What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[rotting bones]

Not to be snarky, but this is like asking if Newton had maybe considered the idea that large bodies attract each other. Why some societies are more benign than others, and whether the benign ones can be scaled up, is precisely what their book is about.

I wrote quite a bit about it here.

I'm about halfway through Graeber's book. It doesn't seem to mention anything I didn't already agree with, except some details I didn't know about west coast Native Americans. While it's true that different societies go out of their way to punish different offenses, I strongly disbelieve that those have a direct relationship with the values consciously preached by the local religion/irreligion. Humans are not only mistaken about external facts, they are habitually mistaken about the values actually held by their own society. If this weren't the case, propaganda wouldn't work.

That's the one. Though I don't know if the 'Death Cult' monitor is terribly appropriate.

Were the Natchez part of it? The Natchez king behaved like the Bhogetan kings: "His every movement was greeted by elaborate rituals of deference, bowing and scraping; he could order arbitrary executions, help himself to any of his subjects’ possessions, do pretty much anything he liked." - Graeber

[Torco]

TDOE is an excellent book, I not only thoroughly enjoyed it, but it sort of... I don't know, gave me solarpunk hope? They don't argue that native north americans were better, they pointed out that some native north americans were better (regarding this dimension of freedom and democracy). others, of course, were much worse, just look at the mexicas. I also liked that they wear their prescriptions and value judgements on their sleeves: they're not doing this dishonest thing done in much of social science of "no, i'm objective and merely look at the data to see what it says (plot twist: I obviously have an agenda, I just didn't tell you about it and you found out in the second to last chapter)". no, they care about freedom and so they look at the past from the perspective of unfreedom etc.

tony ann on Youtube

Thanks! I didn't know this dude, and his playing is excellent... minimalism is cool and nice.

[zompist]

Why some societies are more benign than others, and whether the benign ones can be scaled up, is precisely what their book is about.

I'm about halfway through Graeber's book. It doesn't seem to mention anything I didn't already agree with, except some details I didn't know about west coast Native Americans. While it's true that different societies go out of their way to punish different offenses, I strongly disbelieve that those have a direct relationship with the values consciously preached by the local religion/irreligion.

I can't make any sense of this, unless you are purposely defining "religion" as "the aspects of society I dislike," so that (say) Wendat values are "not religion".

To my mind, the values in Native North American societies were near-universal, strongly held, affected society in tangible ways (e.g., preventing hunger, allowing people to move across the continent), and different from European societies in ways obvious to both sides. Since they persisted over centuries, they were communicated to new generations. That is a religion, or a belief system; if you want to put it another way that's fine, but then you are using "religion" in a different sense.

(I don't know much about Native North American cosmology or ritual, but if I'm not mistaken, the clans— the very social structures which enabled people to leave one tribe and join another far away— were ritualized. Clan identity had to be pretty strong to override normal human xenophobia.)

Humans are not only mistaken about external facts, they are habitually mistaken about the values actually held by their own society.

I'm not sure what you mean here. It's true in some obvious senses:

* If you're thinking of doctrine or national ideology, most people don't hold the official tenets. (If you invite a bunch of Christians to freely talk about Jesus, you'll probably hear every historical heresy.)
* People disagree with other people's values.
* Per Marvin Harris, people often don't know where important facets of their own culture come from.

In the case at hand, though, the Wendat and other Native North American peoples— are you maintaining that the Wendat did not know about their own values of freedom and equality? They seemed quite able, if they were asked, to explain exactly what they liked about their own society and what they disliked about Europeans.

[Man in Space]

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard debuted a new song, “Gila Monster”, the other day.

[Man in Space]

Monolord – “Empress Rising”

[alice]

The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, by Kim Newman. For the third time.

[rotting bones]

I found the clearest book on Machine Learning I've ever read: Advanced Deep Learning with TensorFlow 2 and Keras by Atienza. I don't know why, but a lot of Deep Learning books feel like they're wrapped in incredible quantities of fluff. This is probably because the material is so simple. Since "Advanced Deep Learning" has more content to cover, this one is straightforward and to the point.

PS. I'm reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I'm not sure whether it's good yet.

PPS. Another book I'm starting is The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

[rotting bones]

The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, by Kim Newman. For the third time.

This kind of purple prose is not for everyone, but I'm liking it.

[foxcatdog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPGct0yRPM8
This

[alice]

The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, by Kim Newman. For the third time.

This kind of purple prose is not for everyone, but I'm liking it.

I see what you did there!

[Raphael]

I just read The Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism by John Ganz:

https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-joc ... of-fascism

Wow. I'm still not sure what to make of it. I don't know anything about the guy who wrote it, so I don't know if he's done or said or written anything cancel-worthy, so I'll focus on this one piece for now.

For my taste, the piece veers too much into speaking in the Theorese Language from time to time, and makes too much use of the ideas fashionable among Theorese-speakers, but I can't help getting the impression that he's on to something.

[Ares Land]

I just read The Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism by John Ganz:

https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-joc ... of-fascism

Immaturity perhaps? Fascists generally strike me as very immature people -- so it makes sense they'd come across as teenagers.

[rotting bones]

I just read The Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism by John Ganz:

https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-joc ... of-fascism

Wow. I'm still not sure what to make of it. I don't know anything about the guy who wrote it, so I don't know if he's done or said or written anything cancel-worthy, so I'll focus on this one piece for now.

For my taste, the piece veers too much into speaking in the Theorese Language from time to time, and makes too much use of the ideas fashionable among Theorese-speakers, but I can't help getting the impression that he's on to something.

I like it.

It's a very old theory that Nazism has something to do with having an inferiority complex. Add the observation that Italian fascists had a superiority complex that wasn't borne out by reality (what was the phrase, "straw Caesar"?), and you end up with something similar to this theory.

[Raphael]

It also relates a bit to Rick Perlstein's concept of "Franklins" and Orthogonians" in Nixonland.

[Raphael]

I'm currently reading parts of a few non-fiction collections by Margaret Atwood. I was a bit hesitant about that at first; I didn't want to come across - not even to myself - as one of the people who are all like "Look how erudite I am - I'm reading one of the most celebrated writers of our times!" But it turns out that she's actually a quite insightful, observant, nuanced, and thoughtful commentator on the world. So don't be distracted by hype: someone can be well worth your time even though there's a lot of hype around them, and someone can be a great and interesting writer even though a lot of people tell you they're a great and interesting writer.

This excerpt from an autobiographical passage in a piece on writers made me smile, though:

My parents were both from Nova Scotia, a province from which they felt themselves in exile all their lives. My father was born in 1906, and was the son of a backwoods farmer. His mother had been a schoolteacher, and it was she who encouraged my father to educate himself - through correspondence courses, there being no high school within reach. He then went to Normal School, taught primary school, saved the money from that, got a scholarship, worked in lumber camps, lived in tents during the summers, cooked his own food, cleaned out rabbit hutches at a low wage, managed at the same time to send enough money ‘home’ to put his three sisters through high school, and ended up with a doctorate in Forest Entomology. As you might deduce, he believed in self-sufficiency, and Henry David Thoreau was one of the writers he admired.

My mother’s father was a country doctor of the kind that drove a sleigh and team through blizzards to deliver babies on kitchen tables. She herself was a tomboy who loved riding horses and ice-skating, had scant use for housework, walked barn ridgepoles, and practiced her piano pieces - since various efforts were made to turn her into a lady - with a novel open on her knees. My father saw her sliding down a banister at Normal School and decided then and there that she was the girl he would marry.

By the time I was born, my father was running a tiny forest-insect research station in northern Québec. Every spring my parents would take off for the North; every autumn, when the snow set in, they would return to a city - usually to a different apartment each time. At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown.

Umh, Ms Atwood, were you trying to defend yourself against people who had accused you of being insufficiently Canadian?

[rotting bones]

I haven't finished The Handmaid's Tale yet.

I'm playing The Case of the Golden Idol, an award-winning detective puzzle game. You're shown static scenes where you can examine objects and read documents. You then have to arrange the clues to form the solution. I bought this game a while back, but I didn't have time to play it.

[Ares Land]

Umh, Ms Atwood, were you trying to defend yourself against people who had accused you of being insufficiently Canadian?

I'm reminded on the old Chuck Norris jokes; he was born as we all know in a log cabin he had built himself.

[Raphael]

I'm reminded on the old Chuck Norris jokes; he was born as we all know in a log cabin he had built himself.

I think the oldest version of that joke was about Abraham Lincoln. A later variant simply said that that's how the average male US politician wants to be seen by the voters.

[Raphael]

I just finished How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson. Interesting, though not quite what I expected. I had expected a book about how terrorist violence after Lee's surrender undermined and destroyed Reconstruction and led to the creation of Jim Crow. But there's relatively little on that. Instead, it's basically a political and ideological history of the USA from the beginnings of the first English colonial settlements to the Trump Administration.

Her central thesis seems to be that after 1865, the ideology of the beaten Southern plantation owner elite moved to the Western USA, whose mining-, cattle-, and irrigation-based economy was as much based on capital-intense resource extraction as the Southern cotton trade, and eventually, Western and Southern elites combined to take over much of national politics.

She probably has a bit of a point, but I'd say on the whole she's to easy on the Northeastern business elites, and the Northeastern US in general. After all, the influence of the Northeastern business elites was probably a big part of the reason why the Republican Party didn't end up as a run-of-the-mill center-left party after 1865.

Two minor criticisms: first, I'd say she to friendly towards the Eisenhower Administration. She presents Eisenhower as pro-integration, when in fact, he apparently took his integrationist measures only very reluctantly. Second, she's IMO too willing to accept the Right's claims about being "individualist" at face value. Yes, she's very critical of right-wing "individualism", but she still calls it "individualism", which I wouldn't do.

[Raphael]

Finished How to Fix Northern Ireland by Malachi O'Doherty. I found almost all of it very interesting and informative. However, the least convincing part, IMO, is the last part, when he moves on from describing the problems to trying to suggest possible moves towards solving them. For instance, he seriously recommends removing all public displays of sectarian symbols and imagery. Now, of course I know a lot less about the place than he does, but what little I know about it makes me think that if anyone tried to really do that, it would probably spark an explosion that would make the current mess look fairly benign in comparison. So, while I'm very impressed with his descriptions of the various problems, I'm less impressed with his proposals for addressing them.

Oh, and a minor content warning (aside from the descriptions of bloodshed etc.): when he's describing bigoted terms people might use, he spells those terms out, instead of the "letter-dash-dash-dash" approach.