Someone added all this into a goodreads list, so that you can mark them 'read later'.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/106375.YC_s_Winter_Readi...
YC's Winter Reading List
171–180 of 223 posts
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#172Comments on a couple of the selections: - Grit - I can see why it's caught on, it's pretty well-written and informative, but it's not one of the stronger books in the genre and I don't think it will stand the test of time. I recommend The Willpower Instinct - by Kelly McGonigal and Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise - by Anders Ericsson in its place. - The Rent Is Too Damn High - Matt Yglesias is an inte…
Can you provide a more clear link to evidence of your claim that Yglesias deleted 3000 tweets about Obamacare? I see images of a few tweets deleted. Perhaps Twitter is showing us different messages below the message you directly linked.
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hillbilly Elegy is excellent and touches on some of the points, but really just read conservatives. We're not exactly shy about what we don't like about modern liberalism. Go peruse the pages of National Review or Commentary Magazine.
The question that Strangers tries to answer is: why do working-class whites vote Republican? The National Review doesn't answer that, it tells me how conservative elites think. I'm happy to read a primary source by someone in the working class but I haven't found it.
First, read Hillbilly Elegy. It's not directly about politics, but Vance is a working-class man who came from a home marked by substance abuse and every other kind of dysfunction you can imagine to become a Yale law graduate who works at an SV VC. It's at times tragic, at others hilarious, but it's always compelling and insightful. And it's hailed by conservatives, from humble backgrounds and rich, as an essential compendium when it comes to understanding the Trump phenomenon.
I can't recommend a primary source that answers your question, as I've yet to find one. Vance aside, the white working class is not known for its prodigious literary output. But I found this article enlightening[1]. Granted, I'm a middle-class coastal professional, so my personal ability to discern its truth is limited. And the author injects a little too much of her own progressivism for my taste. But it passes the sniff test for me.
[1]https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-t...
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#174Comments on a couple of the selections: - Grit - I can see why it's caught on, it's pretty well-written and informative, but it's not one of the stronger books in the genre and I don't think it will stand the test of time. I recommend The Willpower Instinct - by Kelly McGonigal and Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise - by Anders Ericsson in its place. - The Rent Is Too Damn High - Matt Yglesias is an inte…
Can you provide a more clear link to evidence of your claim that Yglesias deleted 3000 tweets about Obamacare? I see images of a few tweets deleted. Perhaps Twitter is showing us different messages below the message you directly linked.
I don't have a link, but he deleted his whole tweet history a couple months ago. I never saw an explanation, but I doubt it had to do with his attitude towards Obamacare, which is well documented elsewhere, and which hasn't changed that much.
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#175Comments on a couple of the selections: - Grit - I can see why it's caught on, it's pretty well-written and informative, but it's not one of the stronger books in the genre and I don't think it will stand the test of time. I recommend The Willpower Instinct - by Kelly McGonigal and Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise - by Anders Ericsson in its place. - The Rent Is Too Damn High - Matt Yglesias is an inte…
Can you provide a more clear link to evidence of your claim that Yglesias deleted 3000 tweets about Obamacare? I see images of a few tweets deleted. Perhaps Twitter is showing us different messages below the message you directly linked.
Sorry, while editing my post I ended up with a ridiculous-looking sentence (obviously all 3000 of those tweets weren't about Obamacare). It looks like at this point he's deleted almost all of his history all the way up through ~November 16th. At the time though it looked like it was just a block of tweets[1], which happened to include a couple of his most popular tweets ever (including the one screenshotted above about Obamacare). The timing of the original deletions was at the same time news was coming out about big premium increases under Obamacare next year, which is where the link between the tweet deletions and Obamacare came from. That may have just been a coincidence, though. It doesn't take away from the fact that he doesn't stand by the opinions he spews to 200k followers.
You can see in the 2nd link is my previous post that someone caught a screenshot of a tweet-deleter app spamming his timeline (this was in late October, I also saw those tweets in real-time), which means he's done another round of cleansing, basically deleting his entire tweet history.
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#176Excellent list!
I've added all the books for people to save books to their reading list here on ShelfJoy
http://shelfjoy.com/shelfjoy/wrap-up-your-2016-with-ycs-wint...
The summer reading list is also available here: http://shelfjoy.com/shelfjoy/ycombinators-summer-list-of-201...
Thanks for the wonderful recommendations to everyone at YC!
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Didn't both of those publications vigorously oppose Trump? Yes. >The "conservative intellectual" niche may be the most politically irrelevant group in the country. Trump won the Presidency, not the Movement. The rest of the GOP, though shell-shocked, has not suddenly ditched conservatism and embraced Trumpism. The vast majority of the GOP members of the House and Senate, and those in state governments, are conservat…
Possibly because they won't be doing it, or at least not going so far as to unconstitutionally refuse to hold hearings on Supreme Court replacements.
On what grounds do you find a refusal to consent to an executive's appointment to be unconstitutional? As someone who's been studying the constitution for five years, it seems eminently constitutional to me as well as every lawyer or law professor I've discussed the matter with.
Washington Post has asserted the claim that it is unconstitutional as a "3 pinocchios" falsity[1]
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#178I spot checked several of these books on Pirate Bay and they were all well seeded and many uploaded today, touche Hackernews! Not that I would be interested in downloading them or anything.
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case you're wondering about how we knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, sexist, racist, homophobic conservatives really think Spare us the martyrdom schtick. Mark Steyn Dinesh D'Souza, Mark Levin, or Ann Coulter would be a much closer approximation Oh come, you have much greater intellectual heavyweights on the right. Why not cite William S. Lind or Paul Weyrich, or the brilliant strategic analysis of the Council fo…
He also refers to Convicted Felon Dinesh D'Souza without adding his well-known title! (Seriously, the man was convicted of violating campaign finance rules, and he's an inveterate liar. Why the hell would anyone take his word for anything?)
He went to jail; it's true. That doesn't make his writing any more or less good. If you have a critique of his writings or books, it would be better to lead off with that than to make ad hominem attacks.
Oscar Wilde, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Sir Walter Raleigh and Thoreau all spent time in jail or prison. Should we discard them as well, or should we evaluate their works on their individual merit of those works?
Re: YC's Winter Reading List
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't both of those publications vigorously oppose Trump? The "conservative intellectual" niche may be the most politically irrelevant group in the country.
>Didn't both of those publications vigorously oppose Trump? Yes. >The "conservative intellectual" niche may be the most politically irrelevant group in the country. Trump won the Presidency, not the Movement. The rest of the GOP, though shell-shocked, has not suddenly ditched conservatism and embraced Trumpism. The vast majority of the GOP members of the House and Senate, and those in state governments, are conservat…
As I can't edit this comment any more, let me apologize for the "obstruction" bit. It was a cheap blow, not a meaningful contribution. But please do pay attention to the "checks and balances" bit, then go read Federalist 51[1] (if men were angels...) or at least a decent summary of it[2]. This notion of government being designed to pit power against power in an effort to avoid what Trump would be if he governed unopposed is central to conservative belief, and it's why we keep banging on about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution.
[1] http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm
[2] https://mises.org/library/if-men-were-angels
The money shot:
"The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."