Zompist Bboard Again

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 3:39 pm 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.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 3:43 am That's the one. Though I don't know if the 'Death Cult' monitor is terribly appropriate.

WarpedWartWars wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 11:22 pm tony ann on Youtube

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Mar 19, 2023 12:57 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 3:39 pm 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.

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

alice wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:18 am The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, by Kim Newman. For the third time.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 4:06 pm

alice wrote: ↑Thu Mar 23, 2023 5:18 am 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.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:08 am I just read The Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism by John Ganz:

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

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:08 am 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.

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.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 4:59 pm

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

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Mar 30, 2023 2:43 am I'm reminded on the old Chuck Norris jokes; he was born as we all know in a log cabin he had built himself.