Which Book Are You Reading Now? Volume XII

[Traitorfish]

Compared to anything that liberals claim (i.e. society grows rich if we respect property rights, abolishing sexual norms will liberate people). He's not pining for the old days, he's just saying that, for all of liberalism's historic benefits, it is no longer the answer to anyone's problem.

I was going to object that "private property + feminism" is a pretty narrow way of framing liberalism, but in all honesty it's a pretty fair summary of the 2016 Clinton campaign.

 

[Mouthwash]

There's no difference.

I meant the anti-globalism stuff in Trump's campaign. I'm not claiming he actually followed through on it (though how many tariffs did Reagan proudly implement)?

So liberalism falls short of its own ideals? Or it falls short of some ideal Utopian society that exists only in the mind of liberals? IMO the fair judge is against other actually-existing societies, not imaginary perfect ones.

He's not actually comparing it to other societies (well, except maybe the Amish). The core claim is that liberalism caused the problems that people think can be fixed through application of more liberalism.

Well I don't know what the book is like, but I found the name dropping review meaningless.

It doesn't even indicate which of the myriad interpretations of liberalism that Patrick J Deneen claimed has failed.

Sorry, I read a different review than the one I linked to... and I can't find the original.

It isn't a real definition so much as an attempt to get to the core of what liberals have argued for, ever since there was such a movement. There's no attempt to say 'this is what liberals really want.'

EDIT: That's not the best way to put it. It's really that liberals of all stripes have always held certain things in common, and that they have slowly drifted towards the most extreme accretions of it.

 

[Takhisis]

Oh ok. Yeah the comic didn't have any comments on it so I was confused as to what you meant.

The Martian was his breakout hit so he wrote it before he was a famous author. This meant he was able to write it and publish it online and get feedback and revise it all before any serious money changed hands or contracts were written. But for Artemis, I assumed he had a book deal specifically to write it so the publisher wasn't about to let him publish it chapter by chapter for free and get feedback on it as they would cut into their sales. So he just wrote it himself with conventional editorial help and it stunk as a direct consequence.

Something that was especially disappointing is he had so many opportunities to really dive deep into the technology behind the moon colony (like he did with the Martian) but he didn't. I guess that's because for this book he wrote it in first-person which doesn't lend itself as well to that kind of exposition but in any case it was sad you don't actually learn that much about the moon colony.

There was one scene that really struck me as agregious Mary Sue-ism. The main character has to open and close a bunch of valves to restore atmosphere in the colony and she just stares at a schematic for a few seconds and memorizes it completely. Then she goes outside and knows exactly which valves to open and close. Complicated schematics are highly abstracted from reality - you can't just memorize them in a few seconds. And if you just stare at the schematic and then go look at all the valves without the schematic you are not going to be able to translate that schematic onto what you are seeing with no trouble in less than a minute. It was ridiculous but that's kind of how the whole book went. She saw a problem and instantly was able to fix it because even though she's a fedex delivery woman she knows all the things.

At one point she casually explained how easily she understood her friend's orbital dynamics homework despite never taken advanced math or anything related to orbits. Like yeah, it only took Newton a decade to invent that and it takes years for grad students to master it but you got it in thirty minutes of browsing wikipedia.

Hmmmm, sounds as if Quantum Cop from Casey and Andy had just been made into a spacer gurl character. But Quantum Cop was meant to be that way, simply because he was a parody.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I am slowly and haphazardly (as I acquire them via gifts and occasional purchase) working my way through various titles in the "SF Masterworks" series that I'd never previously read. ("Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny, "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner, and "Mockingbird" by Walter Tevis were the last ones in this series I read before this one). I'm only a couple of chapters in so far, though.

Great books. You should also read the Cluster series by Piers Anthony. Five great books.

 

[Cutlass]

I was going to object that "private property + feminism" is a pretty narrow way of framing liberalism, but in all honesty it's a pretty fair summary of the 2016 Clinton campaign.

Hillary Clinton didn't even pretend to run for office as a liberal.

 

[Takhisis]

Yeah, well, given what Moutwash claims liberalism to be, I'm not sure he would be able to tell the difference.

 

[Mouthwash]

What do you imagine I'm claiming it to be? I don't think it's even a doctrine. It's a system of thought.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive Church and Randolph Conrad covers Swiss history from the 1000's to the 2010's. The overarching message is the presence of conflict and division throughout the centuries despite the common perception of stability and homogeneity. Another important theme is the importance of history to the Swiss in reinforcing their identity, such as the usage of the William Tell story and the notion of the nation's exceptionalism. The book does a fine job of examining the interplay between various factors in Swiss history. An example is Swiss mercenary work: it encourages and is encouraged by neutrality, it leads to prosperity which reinforces neutrality and conservatism, etc. Another would be how linguistic diversity led to and interacted with a federal structure with direct democracy.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am reading The Turn of the Screw.

Re-read Chechov's The black monk (curiously i recalled it very differently; the part i mostly was impressed by seems to last only for a paragraph).
Read a rather bad story by Dickens (On trial for murder - or The trial for murder, something like that).

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The author of Leaving Earth keeps making these stupid, shallow arguments that the Soviet space program led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's getting on my nerves.

The Soviets did open their program up (i.e. dropped a lot of the secrecy) toward the end and that this somehow led freedom to take root and bring down the whole system. The rest of the book is quite good and I'm enjoying the history lesson but these sections are just laughable.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

A History of the Philippines: from Indios Bravos to Filipinos charts the course of the Philippine islands from pre-Hispanic times to the early 21st century. Dominance by elites is a recurring theme: the ilustrados who lit the fires of nationalism, Aguinaldo prevailing over Bonifacio, the constant failures of land reform, and political dynasties decades in the making. The main challenges the nation has faced and will continue to face are religion (from Spanish friars to the Catholic church which opposes contraception and the Muslim insurgency in the south) and inequality (between colonizer and colonized and now internal: the corrupt haves and the powerless have-nots).

Since the book's coverage ends before 2010, the main external great power influence is named as the US. Thus, the recent rise of China is not mentioned, despite being of monumental importance at the moment.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hm, i read the turn of the screw (Henry James).

Not sure what to make of it.

Imo it only works if James meant (without making this having to be so) that there actually were no ghosts there.

I must say that i was expecting something else. Going by his other main stories i read (The beast in the jungle, The pattern on the carpet -- titles may differ a bit), and also by Lovecraft's claim about The turn of the screw.

 

[Kyriakos]

The horror of the heights, by A.C. Doyle.

It was ok, though with a number of problems.

 

[Ajidica]

Finished up The Chickenshit Club by Jesse Eisinger, all about how and why the Justice Department and the SEC fail to prosecute white collar criminals or banks. Excellent book, but left me feeling almost as depressed at the end as On the Beach, and in that book even the cockroaches die.

EDIT: Seriously CFC? You censor the name of a Pulitzer Prize winning book?

 

[Arakhor]

No, it's just censoring one of various specific arrangements of letters.

 

[Takhisis]

Excellent book, but left me feeling almost as depressed at the end as On the Beach,

 

[Traitorfish]

That guy who bracketed me in with Owen vis-a-vis high-brow non-fiction sure looks like a dummy now, huh?

 

[tjs282]

That guy who bracketed me in with Owen vis-a-vis high-brow non-fiction sure looks like a dummy now, huh?

Did you take offence? Assuming that I was 'that guy', I rather meant it as a compliment...

 

[Traitorfish]

Did you take offence? Assuming that I was 'that guy', I rather meant it as a compliment...

No, just a bit surprised that I've graduated to Owen-level history buffery in the popular perception when a lot of the stuff I read is resolutely middlebrow.

 

[sophie]

I haven't checked in here in awhile. I may give the impression of an erudite scholar reading a bunch of obscure historical works, but christ, if you could see the **** I have playing on the tv in the background while I'm doing that reading...

Josie McLellan, "From Private Photography to Mass Circulation; The Queering of East German Visual Culture, 1968-1989"

Sara James, Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain

Sarah Goodrum, "A Socialist Family of Man: Rita Maah's and Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler's Exhibition Vom Glück des Menschen"

Augustine, Confessiones II-IV

Augustine, De ciuitate dei

John Cassian, Conferences IV

Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, WOmen and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity

Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride