I'm still working my way through Ten Cent Plague. The parts about religious leaders to educators to lawmakers all playing a part in trying to get rid of comics makes me wonder if they were all genuine in their concerns or just busy bodies.The open letters they'd write, appeals to reason and moral decency, the book burnings and pledges to boycott, the censor boards, all of it strikes me as quaint and naive and if it wasn't real history, I'd think it'd all be satire. Maybe it's a hindsight is 20/20 kind of thing, but the while ordeal just seems silly.
I just finished Louis L'Amour's The Quick and the Dead. It's the second time I've read it and its better than the first time around. I think I'm gonna give this copy to a friend who I think might appreciate it.
I think I'll open up some Bret Harte next. I know Mark Twain thought of him as dishonest, but I don't care. He knows how to tell some good stories.
I'm slowly reading Scott Aaronson's 'Quantumn Computing Since Democritus'. It's good armchair computer science--not an easy read, but not something so complicated you need to take notes just to follow along. An excerpt: "The key point is that, while this is a very large buttload of variables and relations, it's still only a polynomial buttload."
I finally had the time to finish Destiny Disrupted last week. The author basically goes through the entire world history from a Muslim/Middle-East perspective. It's in-depth and insightful yet still straight talk. Only minor downside is that there are a lot of unfamiliar names and pronunciations that'll pass by, but the author takes it into account. After DD I listened to the first four hours of Robert Putnam's Our Kids and the first chapter of Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed. You know those NYT specials where they describe the lives of a few people and link it to larger social issues and facts? Putnam is basically that, with inequality as a subject. Pikketty-light. I also picked up Oliver Sacks' The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, which I have been meaning to read for a while now.
I fell down a rabbit hole this week. I stumbled across a post, I don't even remember where, arguing that Nick Land wasn't really drinking the Neo-Reaction kool-aid, but still on the accelerationist kick he was on before he snapped and egging them on for that reason. Now, I never really cared to read the spew from that corner of the Internet firsthand, but the prospect of them all being unwitting players in a bit of political theater was too funny and I had to know. So I read his blog, and I read Fanged Noumena. For the past week I have been knee deep in stuff like this. I'm perfectly willing to believe this guy is much smarter than his peers and knows that they're ridiculous, but I'm not so sure that's enough to conclude he's anything other than he pretends to be. Dude had an unusual relationship with reality before he cracked. Trying to figure him out became much more work than getting the joke was worth. Next week is all comics, I think.
I've been down this rabbit hole, but never really reached a conclusion about Land. You're pretty much where i was at when I gave up and just called a duck a duck for as much as it was worth. I think he liked the joke too much to let it go and it just became his life.
In defense of the Land is playing a different game than the rest theory, I don't think he joins in the hopeful, neofeudalism as utopia stuff. I don't think he ever contradicts it, but he backs the diagnosis, not the cures. If he's playing it straight, he seems fatalistic, like he thinks they're going to get what they want but he's not happy about it.
I've been trudging through Robert Caro's biography series of LBJ. He's been writing one a decade since the 80s, so a lot of detail there. They're really good, but I'd only recommend them to someone with a lot of spare time.
I re-read The Rational Optimist in NYC, because the few Warhammer novels I brought with me didn't even last through the airport before the flight. Still a good read. Ridley's writing about how the market always seems to be able to supply even the most niche material need is interesting. It reinforces my inner belief about humans being a meta-animal at this point. Humans don't really exist in isolation, and recently we've become so interdependent that if we become less connected it might kill us, or at the very least would result in a massive decrease in quality of life. Still a bit too 'Capitalism! Fuck Yeah!' though on the whole, for all of its good points. Maybe that's just my interpretation though.
Most of the way through Book 1 of Will Dutton's "A History of Civilization." I stole it. It's an ancient audiobook transcribed off tape. It's also abridged. Think I will pay for the next one. Kinda weird hearing Gandhi described contrmporaneously. Weirder still to think that as I progress through the books, the author will experience 40 years... And WWII, Korea, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Airlift, McCarthy, Martin Luther King, Vietnam and Nixon. Dude stops the Middle East at the Ottoman Empire and talks about how one day China will be a thriving industrial power... From an era before Chaing Kai Chek.
I searched for Will Dutton's "A History of Civilization" and the first thing that comes up on Duck-Duck-Go for me is this Hubski thread. Your comment isn't even half an hour old. That's crazy fast. No results for that exact book though. I'll have to see if I still have it, cause if I do it's probably in a box tucked away somewhere, but I have a book that is a collection of sermons during the time of American Revolutionary War. It's really interesting to read both sides of the argument, independence vs. being loyal to Britian, from a religious perspective in the words of the people who were living at the time.