191–200 of 256 posts
Having read more books on "how to communicate better" than I should admit to, Murphy's easy yet highly usedul read reminded me just how important listening is, just how important people feeling like they've been heard it.
I'm honestly not doing it just, and pardon the cliche but it was a game changer for me.
https://www.harvard.com/book/youre_not_listening/
p.s. This was my second answer. Sorry?
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino, a great companion to the movie and expands on characters in really unique ways that make me think about them. Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson, a near future book about climate change and trying to fix it with an interesting geopolitical look of China acting like the US. I also liked Ministry of the Future but it was less fun of a read. Coddling of the American…
> Borne by Jeff VanderMeer, a weird near future declinepunk with bioengineering and evil corporations. I loved Shriek: An Afterword, and have wanted to read more VanderMeer for a while. Did you just coin the term 'declinepunk'? I've never heard it before.
Similar would be Battle Angle Alita and the last section from Bone Clocks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brad De Long - a left leaning professor of economics has written extensive, quality take downs of Graeber. Search for him and Graeber. Here is one. https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bradford_DeLong
Another one by Noah Smith, again another left wing economist on why Debt is a poor book : http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you fight a totalitarian from the inside, eg USA, EU, where surveillance is high and any opposition will be ‘disappeared’?
In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed - we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption. In the US or EU no political opposition was 'suicided' or disappeared in a Gulag like it happened in Russia multiple times. In Russia or China you will be arrested for holding up a white pie…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber Graeber misinterprets the history and ideas of mainstream economics, calls the safest securities on the planet a debt that will never be paid and spins bizarre conspiracy theories about the Iraq invasion. You might learn about the quaint cultural practices of remote tribes but a lot of the ideas presented are complete nonsense. You might say it has good and original parts…
The purpose of the book is to make the general-audience reader realize the problems with the conceptual-historical framework of neoliberal economics and politics. David Graeber rightfully argues that Neoliberalism sells itself to the masses by constructing this "quaint" tale of uncivilized barter-practicing foraging tribes turning into coin/money using farmers into debt based industrial-financial empires. I am sure t…
And misrepresenting mainstream economics is the way to do that?
> (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully
This is a bizzare take. It's like claiming Graeber gets the premises wrong but somehow the conclusions he draws are correct?
> that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest).
But somehow these grand sophisticated economic systems did not find takers outside their niches. This is what makes rui stones and cloth bolts quaint curiosities compared to coinage and credit when discussing the 5000 years of debt.
> And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"
Too bad he spins nonsensical conspiracy theories to do that. And you agree that it's a work of political rhetoric and not dispassionate scholarship.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you fight a totalitarian from the inside, eg USA, EU, where surveillance is high and any opposition will be ‘disappeared’?
In the West we still have democracy - yes might be on its last few legs, but it's not too late, as the 2020 election showed - we the people just need to come together and be more organized and strategic and remove the corruption. In the US or EU no political opposition was 'suicided' or disappeared in a Gulag like it happened in Russia multiple times. In Russia or China you will be arrested for holding up a white pie…
In fact, this episode of Freakanomics talks about The Politics Industrial Complex and how The Media is on the inside of that bubble. In short, without a healthy and objective Fourth Estate there is no democracy. Add in the duopoly one-party choices and it gets even worse.
There's more to democracy than getting to vote. What we're living is the Orwellian defintion of democracy.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/im-your-biggest-fan/
I also heard it said on another reputable podcast - I think it was "How I built this" - that the top corporate guest of the Obama WH was Google. I'm trying to verify that. This looks close enough.
It's odd that a POTUS who sold hope would be so closely aligned with a surveillance company.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
See also: "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" for a look behind Google's public facing narrative.
The Pentagon keeps failing its audits, to the tune of trillions of dollars, and the people are silent. Trillions? If it walks like corruption and talks like corruption...well we all should see where this is going. Yet, zero opposition to this?
That's enough for now.
As parents we wanted to be one of the better ones. A while back, we started with Bringing up Bébé , and since then learnt How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk ; we were even Prepared while Reviving Ophelia . This year , we realized, we want to just settle on being A Good Enough Parent . 1. https://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Up-Bébé-Discovers-Parenting/... 2. https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-W…
I didn't realize I might have the wrong link to the book everywhere I wrote until now (this comment thread). "A Good Enough Parent: A Book on Child-Rearing" by Bruno Bettelheim. It is not a popular book. The approaches and ideas were great though, and that was indeed the beauty of the book. Here is the correct link - https://www.amazon.com/Good-Enough-Parent-Book-Child-Rearing...
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. It merges science and storytelling in an amazing way, I can highly recommend it. The books are long, but they didn't seem like it. Neuromancer by William Gibson. The book that started cyberpunk. I love the genre, but I think it's well worth a read just to see how he can craft a world with language. I sometimes found it hard to understand what exactly was happening, but the vi…
Those are really good choices. I re-read the Mars trilogy every couple of years, though the differences between the book's timeline and our own are getting a little embarrassing :-) Here are some early "cyberpunk" books that people may not be aware of. I'm using a loose definition of stories where networked computers play a major role, the characters are technologically sophisticated and from the shady edge of societ…