Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman

Did Not Finish, mainly because you get pretty much all you need to know out of the introduction and first chapter. After that it's basically painting-the-target-around-the-arrow through a number of 1980s-1990s political news stories. As well, Chomsky is a socialist dick, which was my main emotional reason for putting the book down, but we'll get to that.

Let's get the good parts out first:

If you've been hanging around the manosphere for a while, and in particular if you've been following anything the mainstream media has been doing to Donald Trump over the past two years or so, you've gotten a pretty intuitive education in what this book tells you.

In essence, Chomsky's central argument - that the mainstream media's daily servings are explained/explainable via a Propaganda Model - is a pretty solid lens through which to view what passes for news on your TV stations every day. At the very least, that propaganda model is stated pretty clearly in this book and it's good to review the fundamentals of how that model works. Wikipedia has a solid enough article on the model which you could read without having to dredge your way through Chomsky's book, though if you need convincing, I'd encourage you to read the intro and first chapter at least. The criticism of the model that exists is pretty weak counterpunching at least.

Basically, all mainstream media is essentially corrupt, and self-censors as effectively if not more effectively than if the government was in the newsrooms with blackout markers. The media, without exception, serves the elite primarily because of its nature as
(1) corporatised;
(2) dependent on advertising and therefore consumerism;
(3) dependent on government and large institutions for a constant feed of shit.

The phrase "controlled opposition" is applicable to the odd article criticising the government or the elite that is published. These are ways of convincing you that the media is "objective", when in reality it isn't, and hasn't been since at least the 1900s or so. Only the nature of the elite controlling it has changed. That's why the model remains useful, and also why Chomsky's attitude in it proves unintentionally hilarious.

Now, let's talk about the bad:

(1) The book tries to cloak itself in pseudo-scientific form. It "proposes" a "model" of how media can be expected to behave, as though we were conducting some form of controlled experiment. This is intellectual dishonesty, mainly because the "experiments" that Chomsky conducts on whether one form of article got into the media or not depend heavily on his personal viewpoint of what is objectivity. If you've been around this site a while, you'll already know that most social science is bogus, and this book tries to act like social science. That is, when you're reading this screed, be very, very aware of intellectual fallacies and in particular the way Chomsky tries to portray his viewpoint as objective and that of the media as biased.

(2) Chomsky's a socialist. Always has been. Therefore the entire book is tainted with his prevailing bias that the Left always gets hard done by in the media and the Right is always in control. He basically is still fighting the good fight against Ronald Reagan. This compromises his vision, though doesn't invalidate it entirely; as said, I regard the "model" as painting a bullseye around an arrow after it's hit a wall, but it doesn't change the fact there is a wall there to begin with.

As a result, the book becomes unintentionally hilarious and outdated as Chomsky proclaims the conservative Right is the elite and is in control of the media. I very much doubt this is the case anymore; the workings of the media during the entire Clinton administration somehow magically avoids any scrutiny, despite the book having been written in 1988 and then "updated" 20 years later in 2008. If the Right was in control of the media, it sure as hell is not anymore. What Chomsky does make a powerful point on, though, is that corporate interests control the media, in vast majority to political interests, and it is the corporate interests that continue, immortal as no political party can ever be.

The Left is never criticised, or if criticised, is softballed. In the case of the killing of Oscar Romero and other Catholic Church officials, Chomsky advocates via Romero's letters that the Left was merely "defending itself" from the police and government forces. Whether the situation might be a bit more nuanced than that never enters his mind.

In particular -- and it's a useful barometer for whether a pundit has done his homework or not -- Chomsky fails my personal test of research, because he runs the same tired old argument that Agent Orange killed people in Vietnam. It didn't. So go ahead and read it if you need some fine-tuning of your intuition that the media is out to screw you always and everywhere, but you could get much the same out of Wikipedia.

^^ I thought it was a great book. Don't really care if Chomsky is a socialist, I don't think it took anything away from his argument. Also, I don't remember him ever saying "the Right" controls the media? His argument is more that it's a self-serving, highly narrow political spectrum through which opinions can be expressed. The book is not about Left vs. Right. You missed the point.

(07-07-2018 10:45 AM)TigerMandingo Wrote:  ^^ I thought it was a great book. Don't really care if Chomsky is a socialist, I don't think it took anything away from his argument. Also, I don't remember him ever saying "the Right" controls the media? His argument is more that it's a self-serving, highly narrow political spectrum through which opinions can be expressed. The book is not about Left vs. Right. You missed the point.

Fuck off. I got the point of the book, all right. And as I said it is a useful model for the present day. Doesn't change the fact that Chomsky's too scared to turn the model on his preferred side of the political spectrum. He doesn't turn the model on left-wing newspapers or examine them for bias; therefore, I can interpret his work with that in mind. This is the same bro whose only comment on #MeToo is "investigate carefully before rushing to judgment", not "there is a structural usefulness in vilifying men to the media in order to keep women slaved to the consumerist wheel and to government as Big Daddy", which his own model would predict and confirm.

Chomsky's entire approach is to set himself up as "objective", characterised by cloaking his argument in quasi-scientific appearance -- a "model" that "predicts" newspaper behaviour. He just doesn't have any hint of the objectivity or nuance that he seems to demand from the papers.

If I can detect serious errors of research in his book on Agent Orange, then per another useful little working heuristic on the media -- the Gell-Mann Effect -- I don't particularly need to read through six more chapters of examples "proving" his point. And I got a pretty good sense of his theme in the introduction, preface, and first chapter. It was fairly one-sided, and I doubt it was going to get much more even-handed in the next couple hundred pages, and as I said if you've been hanging around here long enough you've likely already picked up by osmosis that the media is screwing you.

I will say one point he did draw my attention to was that the advertising filter will compel stories that appeal to demographic tranches with money. Hadn't considered that in detail before. This in turn will require instantly-identifiable boogeymen, a cheap dualistic opposition between progressives and conservatives, making people brand themselves.

(07-07-2018 09:03 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  Fuck off.

Ok, bud...

Dies the Fire, S.M. Stirling



I suspect this might be one that YoungBlade, Mage, Dalaran1991 and others might like. First points in favour, on goodreads its main critics are women and soyboys, so that's always an encouraging sign.

The central idea of the novel is basically: what if, in the year 1998, forces unknown suddenly render all higher-order combustion impossible - gunpowder doesn't work, neither does electricity, nuclear reactors are kaput, even steam engines above a certain pressure are rendered inoperable. Fire still exists, and simple Newtonian physics is still reliable, but basically human existence is cast back to, you guessed it, the late Middle Ages in technological terms. Medicine and weedkiller still seems to work, so not all chemical reactions are gone bung, but that's about it.

It's essentially a post-apocalyptic novel in the vein of The Stand, but with a fantasy vein, since Stirling's idea is that humanity (or at least that section of it based in Oregon) quickly reverts back to armour, arrows, and swords as their principal weapons, and back to low-order agriculture to survive.

Stirling reasons that in that sort of scenario, the SCA apparently will rise from their general obese state and cosplaying natures to become capable warriors.

... okay, it isn't quite that bad, but the principal antagonist is a former medieval history lecturer from a university who delights in taking people on in full armour, and who a week or two after the Change is skilled enough to take on four gangbangers at once and slaughters them. Not saying that it's impossible as such - there are some ARMA people who take preserving medieval martial arts with fairly deadly seriousness, look up John Clement et. al. -- but it's a bit clunky. The more serious fighters in the books at least have long backgrounds in letting red juice out of people, the protagonist is a former Marine who'd been a bit of a streetfighter working with weapons long before the Change starts to encourage him to get in chain mail.

The positives are that Stirling was determined to show his work. He obviously researched it hard and researched combat techniques pretty thoroughly, or at least gives the impression of that with the sheer amount of material that's included here. And because I'm a bit of a sucker for this type of thing, I did buy the transformation of the male protagonist into a semi-legendary figure.

The negatives were these:

(1) The writing style doesn't vary enough. It's very tiring on the eye and on the mind. I think that comes because Stirling doesn't vary his paragraphs and choice of description enough. When you're given description to set a scene, there's sentence after sentence of visual images: hardpack road, yellow fields, green trees, with a grey-blue mountain background. This is hard for the brain to absorb mainly because we're evolved/trained to notice distinguishing features, or to better remember variety - different line lengths, different senses engaged in the same paragraph. The brain just switches off when you get too much of the same thing again and again. Makes it too easy to skip over sentences and lines.

(2) This thing was clearly a first book of a franchise, because it doesn't have a lot of real conflict as such; Stirling looks to have emphasised the problems of setting up a neo-medieval world without actually using it to materially drive the plot. There are time lapses out of nowhere and not a lot of theme, though in some ways this actually works because the creation of a new mythology does come out somewhat subtly (if you want to interpret it that way.) Hard to really discuss this without spoiling the whole book, but if you've read Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth you'll see how he can spin bits of mundane existence into different plot directions. It doesn't really happen as clearly or as convincingly in this book, which is a bit of a shame.

(3) Stirling must've been getting his dick sucked by a Wiccan chick while writing this book. Like I said, I think Mage and others would probably enjoy this book, under this heading for the generally anti-Christian stuff and propagation of Wiccan ideas in this book, but I have a suspicion they'd find it laid on thick even for their tastes. That said, the Wiccan stuff does come filtered through a traditionalist lens - as said, the SJWs I saw on goodreads hated this book's portrayal of women, so it wasn't full-on "The goddess empowers women and only women", but there was enough to keep my eyes rolling across the whole book.

So look, I'd call it a 6-7 out of 10. Not bad, or if you're on the low end of barbelling your reading according to Taleb, this one is nice and pulpy and should fit the bill nicely.

(07-08-2018 02:04 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  Dies the Fire, S.M. Stirling



I suspect this might be one that YoungBlade, Mage, Dalaran1991 and others might like. First points in favour, on goodreads its main critics are women and soyboys, so that's always an encouraging sign.

The central idea of the novel is basically: what if, in the year 1998, forces unknown suddenly render all higher-order combustion impossible - gunpowder doesn't work, neither does electricity, nuclear reactors are kaput, even steam engines above a certain pressure are rendered inoperable. Fire still exists, and simple Newtonian physics is still reliable, but basically human existence is cast back to, you guessed it, the late Middle Ages in technological terms. Medicine and weedkiller still seems to work, so not all chemical reactions are gone bung, but that's about it.

It's essentially a post-apocalyptic novel in the vein of The Stand, but with a fantasy vein, since Stirling's idea is that humanity (or at least that section of it based in Oregon) quickly reverts back to armour, arrows, and swords as their principal weapons, and back to low-order agriculture to survive.

Stirling reasons that in that sort of scenario, the SCA apparently will rise from their general obese state and cosplaying natures to become capable warriors.

... okay, it isn't quite that bad, but the principal antagonist is a former medieval history lecturer from a university who delights in taking people on in full armour, and who a week or two after the Change is skilled enough to take on four gangbangers at once and slaughters them. Not saying that it's impossible as such - there are some ARMA people who take preserving medieval martial arts with fairly deadly seriousness, look up John Clement et. al. -- but it's a bit clunky. The more serious fighters in the books at least have long backgrounds in letting red juice out of people, the protagonist is a former Marine who'd been a bit of a streetfighter working with weapons long before the Change starts to encourage him to get in chain mail.

The positives are that Stirling was determined to show his work. He obviously researched it hard and researched combat techniques pretty thoroughly, or at least gives the impression of that with the sheer amount of material that's included here. And because I'm a bit of a sucker for this type of thing, I did buy the transformation of the male protagonist into a semi-legendary figure.

The negatives were these:

(1) The writing style doesn't vary enough. It's very tiring on the eye and on the mind. I think that comes because Stirling doesn't vary his paragraphs and choice of description enough. When you're given description to set a scene, there's sentence after sentence of visual images: hardpack road, yellow fields, green trees, with a grey-blue mountain background. This is hard for the brain to absorb mainly because we're evolved/trained to notice distinguishing features, or to better remember variety - different line lengths, different senses engaged in the same paragraph. The brain just switches off when you get too much of the same thing again and again. Makes it too easy to skip over sentences and lines.

(2) This thing was clearly a first book of a franchise, because it doesn't have a lot of real conflict as such; Stirling looks to have emphasised the problems of setting up a neo-medieval world without actually using it to materially drive the plot. There are time lapses out of nowhere and not a lot of theme, though in some ways this actually works because the creation of a new mythology does come out somewhat subtly (if you want to interpret it that way.) Hard to really discuss this without spoiling the whole book, but if you've read Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth you'll see how he can spin bits of mundane existence into different plot directions. It doesn't really happen as clearly or as convincingly in this book, which is a bit of a shame.

(3) Stirling must've been getting his dick sucked by a Wiccan chick while writing this book. Like I said, I think Mage and others would probably enjoy this book, under this heading for the generally anti-Christian stuff and propagation of Wiccan ideas in this book, but I have a suspicion they'd find it laid on thick even for their tastes. That said, the Wiccan stuff does come filtered through a traditionalist lens - as said, the SJWs I saw on goodreads hated this book's portrayal of women, so it wasn't full-on "The goddess empowers women and only women", but there was enough to keep my eyes rolling across the whole book.

So look, I'd call it a 6-7 out of 10. Not bad, or if you're on the low end of barbelling your reading according to Taleb, this one is nice and pulpy and should fit the bill nicely.

I've read about 10 books in this series, plus the three in the Island in the Sea of Time series that preceded it. I enjoyed them very much, for the SciFi world building, and for the simultaneous historical fiction. I also enjoy a lot of military SciFi, which this very much is.

He can be a little repetitive, but a lot of Scifi and pulp fiction is generally.

One point I will make is that I started reading these books long before I took the red pill, and have read the last few since then. There are a lot of ass kicking female characters in here that can defeat trained warrior men one after the other. Also, the way relationships are portrayed is often blue pill. It's weird, because the men are usually strong, confident, courageous, and so forth. Even the villains tend to be quite masculine. So, it is natural that the women would find them attractive.
Still, the behavior of men and women towards each other once they get involved definitely has a blue pill ring to it. I find this is true of nearly all fiction, both written, and in TV and movies, so you have to just take it with a grain of salt.

I would recommend the books of this series, and I would recommend books by S.M. Stirling in general.

(07-09-2018 07:01 PM)RoastBeefCurtains4Me Wrote:  took the red pill, and have read the last few since then. There are a lot of ass kicking female characters in here that can defeat trained warrior men one after the other. Also, the way relationships are portrayed is often blue pill. It's weird, because the men are usually strong, confident, courageous, and so forth. Even the villains tend to be quite masculine. So, it is natural that the women would find them attractive.
Still, the behavior of men and women towards each other once they get involved definitely has a blue pill ring to it. I find this is true of nearly all fiction, both written, and in TV and movies, so you have to just take it with a grain of salt.

I would recommend the books of this series, and I would recommend books by S.M. Stirling in general.

I agree that the asskicking women trope is a bit bullshit, but the "respect your woman" in the first book I didn't actually mind so much mainly because in the book's context it makes more sense than it does in our society.

Mainly because the fictional universe of the book doesn't strike me as one where hypergamous divorce behaviour by women is quite as available: it's only the cockroaches and rats debating anything in the Family Courts anymore. Roving cultural enrichment gangs, reduced population and likely higher child mortality rates mean that women have a good fucking reason to actually stick to provider men now, and because we're back to low labor multipliers as internal combustion engines don't work anymore rather more compel a man to look after a woman who's actually going to take care of a home and look after their kids.

This is maybe the one scenario when that Nature study would most likely start to take effect - risk averseness means women start settling for Mr Provider rather than Mr Passing Chad in settlements of less than 1,000 people.

Don't know if that dynamic continues into future books, but to me this is basically a society where beta characteristics are to be expected or have some value, since we're back to a quasi-feudal society where the warriors can't get along without farmers, and the farmers can't get along without warriors.

Bronze Age Mindset

This is a dangerous book, but I would recommend it to every man who finds himself feeling "boxed-in" in the modern world. It is like throwing a fire brand into your soul.

What is it about? Well, it's a nonfiction exhortation to a kind of victorious vitalism, with deference to aesthetic, powerful bodies and military might. Profoundly insightful in parts, it is an unapologetic epoc-leaping stream of consciousness that you would not normally read.

I think the author used to post around here a few years back. He has a pretty large twitter following now.

(07-09-2018 09:56 PM)Slam Wrote:  Bronze Age Mindset

This is a dangerous book, but I would recommend it to every man who finds himself feeling "boxed-in" in the modern world. It is like throwing a fire brand into your soul.

What is it about? Well, it's a nonfiction exhortation to a kind of victorious vitalism, with deference to aesthetic, powerful bodies and military might. Profoundly insightful in parts, it is an unapologetic epoc-leaping stream of consciousness that you would not normally read.

I think the author used to post around here a few years back. He has a pretty large twitter following now.

Definitely worth a read, but I'd say it's not for the uninitiated. I'm a fan of the twitter feed @bronzeagemanits (the former account was @bronzeagepervet, which was unfortunately banned). Handing this book off to a normie or boomer will only draw confused stares.

The book certainly has a unique style. Intentional misspellings and frequently dropping articles such as "the" and "a" can either charm or grate, depending on your tastes. The best chapters are full of ancient anecdotes and the pages can fly by. The worst are full of esoteric ramblings and even paragraphs drag.

Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb



Note the cover: an elephant, which never forgets, and which has a broken tusk ... i.e. it has taken some risk and it has survived. It has, in a word, skin in the game.

Go and read this book. Or if you can't find a copy of it, at least go over to Taleb's Medium site, Incerto, and start reading; a fair proportion of the book is contained in a series of articles at that site. Jesus, here.

That said, the entirety of the book isn't in the articles, and for some reason I can't explain - maybe it's just the difference between reading on the Internet and reading a text - there were lots of little connectors and insights to be found in this.

The most salient stuff I can think of right now, which I haven't otherwise touched on in posts here and elsewhere, is this:

The deepest insight to be understood in the book here is the concept of ergodicity, an example of which is: if you base your probability of winning at the casino on some idiot of a social scientist who concludes out of a sample of 100 punters going to a casino once that 40% of them will come out ahead, you are asking for trouble. This is an ensemble sample, deciding a probability based on a group of people in single transactions. It is also how most social science assesses the subject of probability. And what it misses is the other way of sampling: time sampling, which is to just take one of those punters and see what his likelihood of winning is when you run him through the casino 100 times. In his case, bankruptcy will arrive much faster than the 100 visits to the wheel. If he's wiped out on visit 28, there will be no 29. Which makes his actual probability of wipeout 100%.

That is, most probability in this area doesn't account for what the risky action you're doing does to you over time. Ergodicity, in essence, is to take into account the probability of (1) ruin, and (2) the risks inherent in repeated exposure. If there is even the possibility of ruin in an act, all cost-benefit analyses are essentially worthless.

Put it another way: suppose you are to win 1 million dollars on Russian Roulette. Naive statistics say your notional expected return from any single round of Russian Roulette is about $833,000, since if six people play Russian Roulette at once, five out of six of those people will get a payout. The moment you as an individual play more than once, though, your expected return is "not computable", i.e. it breaks down entirely since your odds of getting the bullet increase each time.

Cost-benefit analyses conclude that it's fine to smoke any single cigarette, since your odds of getting lung cancer from any one cigarette are tiny. But that's not the point: the risk from lung cancer comes from repeated exposures to the risk.

Taleb reduces it to one line: "If one claimed there is 'statistical evidence that a plane is safe', with a 98 percent confidence level (statistics are meaningless without such confidence bands) and acted on it, practically no experienced pilot would be alive today."

Makes you think again about Superman's joke line that flying is statistically speaking still the safest way to travel. Too bad the statistics don't account for the fact that ruin is essentially inevitable if the numbers don't go your way: not a lot of people survive plane crashes. Ergo, the statistics are meaningless. Your paranoia about getting on planes is entirely justified, very much so if you're a frequent traveller and thus expose yourself repeatedly to the risk.

It's when you start applying this form of logic to stuff that "in small doses" apparently does no harm to you -- for example, half of Monsanto's back catalogue of hits -- that you start to think about a lot of things like that, and a bit of a chill runs down your spine. Often, the probabilities are spun this way precisely because of the time sampling problem. Of course the bonus glysophate in the Roundup won't hurt you, the probability is, like, 0.00001% or so that a single dose of the stuff will do you any harm. We won't talk about the farmer who uses it every season, or when it builds up in his system, or the fact he exposes himself to it every time he walks out to his crops and takes a big breath.

This idea is really another facet of the idea of black swans, which has been part of the Incerto since the first book: there is too much opacity in real world probabilities for arrogant science or arrogant statisticians to accurately predict it. Thus, the Black Swan. And thus the two results of it, depending on whether you live in a Mediocristan or an Extremistan: recoverable harm, or catastrophic damage to the system, respectively.

This book is like a keystone to a lot of Taleb's concepts, as with Antifragile it's a real paradigm-changer, although probably less so to those who have read some Taleb already. Either way, the main thing to recommend Taleb is the fact that he has the runs on the board to verify his point of view on life: 20 years as a trader, made his money against the market in 2008, based off the ideas and insights he'd already used and propounded in this series. Read it, read it, read it. I'll go to the Taleb thread a bit later to expand on some other stuff that was already in the book.

Just got this last night and read the intro and first chapter. Looks very promising. I expect it to be an enjoyable read, more like his first book and less like Black Swan which was dull and academic

(07-07-2018 06:45 AM)Stonk Wrote:  @PrideMale.

Check out 'Things fall apart' by Chinua Achebe. One of the greatest literary works ever made.

Just finished Things fall apart by Achebe. Really good book. Is it up there with Animal Farm and Platos Republic? I dunno. But it is one of the greatest African books ever.

(07-09-2018 09:56 PM)Slam Wrote:  Bronze Age Mindset

This is a dangerous book, but I would recommend it to every man who finds himself feeling "boxed-in" in the modern world. It is like throwing a fire brand into your soul.

What is it about? Well, it's a nonfiction exhortation to a kind of victorious vitalism, with deference to aesthetic, powerful bodies and military might. Profoundly insightful in parts, it is an unapologetic epoc-leaping stream of consciousness that you would not normally read.

I think the author used to post around here a few years back. He has a pretty large twitter following now.

Lol I didn't know BAP made a book, that cheeky ass totally no homo admirer of the male physique

(strong no homo, staring at men posing and glistening with sweat in the sun is for inspirational purposes only)

@Pride male.

It is the greatest. Although I'd rank Chukwuemeka Ike's "The Potters Wheel" higher.

My best fiction book ever. One of the best African work of fiction.

Solid storyline that resonates deeply with the West Africans, adept writing and some good humor.

^Have you read Joys of Motherhood by Emechita? What about books by J.M Coetzee?

Recently finished "TEXIT: Why and How Texas Will Leave the Union" by Daniel Miller. Then a few days later I had a chance to speak with the author at the Texas State Republican Convention. It's a well thought out book with engaging writing, I never felt I was reading a scholarly work.

With all the Sturm und Drang from California threatening to leave the US, this book is even more topical.

I have just finished up a book called News from Tartary, by Peter Flemming, brother of Ian who wrote James Bond. It is an *awesome* piece of travel literature, full of wonderful observations and thoughtful commentary. I have just moved abroad for work, and so perhaps it is particularly suited to my palate at the moment, but it is one of the best works in this genre that I've read.

@Pride male.

Yup. Read in Primary School. Classic.

The Log of a Cowboy

Published in 1903 and based on the author's 10-years of working cattle drives on the Great Western Trail. It's a fascinating account of what being a cowboy was really like as well as a snapshot into general life, people, and culture in 1880s United States. In addition, it's a tale of masculine men forming a team to accomplish a mission, in the pursuit of which they solve problems and tame some nature.

One of the interesting things I noticed in the book is that, contrary to Hollywood and TV westerns, the cowboys tried to avoid violence. For example, when a band of grifters scams the book's cowboy crew out of a bunch of money and some of their prized possessions, instead of attacking them the cowboys sheepishly borrow some money to buy their saddles and six-shooters back.

Because the book's copyright is expired, you can read it for free at the link I placed above, or you can buy it from Amazon for about a dollar for your Kindle.

I need a support group. i am currently reading 6 fucking books and I don't want to stop reading any of them, yet I can't finish one because I start another.

This clearly has to stop. Is there a 12-step program for this addiction? I mean, is there a point in my history where I will have to apologize, personally, to all the authors that i've never read their books. What about the one's I did read? Should they feel guilty?

Anyway, in no particular order, the books I am currently reading:

12 Rules of Life--Jordan Perterson
Ordinary Men--Christopher R. Browning
The Truth--Neil Strauss
Death By A Thousand Sluts--John Bodi
Make Your Bed--Admiral William McCraven
The Republic--Plato
Meditations--Marcus Aurelius

Fuck that's actually 7 books. I must've started one without knowing.

Quick breakdown: 12 rules of life... pretty much mandatory reading. Ordinary Men... Quite disturbing. lots of middle-aged German auxiliary police sent to post-war Poland to control the population, and then they just go completely bat-shit insane and become the most ruthless occupiers ever. Pretty grim. The Truth... I dunno. Kinda half-way through it, I got into Game because of Neil Strauss, so it's kinda weird seeing where it landed him. Pretty happy with it so far. Death By A Thousand Sluts--haven't gotten into that one so much yet, but I bought it having read about it here on the forum, so I'm pretty sure it's gonna be good. Make Your Bed.... Popular spinoff from this commencement speech:





The Republic and Meditations are just required reading... You're missing out if you haven't read either. I've read both multiple times (twice for the Republic and 6 times Meditations).

Death By China.

A book about the aggressive rise of China and how it threatens global peace and Western democracy. An eye-opening book on Chinese communist party power grab, state - run mercantilist capitalism, pollution of its environment, capitalist .colonialism and its aggressive offensive military capabilities.

A must read

^I am definitely going to watch death by china the documentary.

The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy.

I enjoyed the first 200 pages of this book (minor spoilers ahead): a teenage boy captures a wild wolf and decides to take return it to the mountains of Mexico (where he thinks it lives for some reason). He comes back to discover his parents have been murdered and their horses have been stolen. So he heads off with his little brother to recover the horses.

After that though, I feel the story started to drag on and become quite repetitive. The prose was beautiful, but there wasn't enough action to keep me intrested. 10 percent of this book's dialogue is on Spanish (with no translation), I guess that would be useful if you were trying to learn Spanish, but if you're not (like me) it can frustrating.

The ending of this book was quite touching though. I'm glad I stuck this one out.

This was my first time reading Cormac McCarthy; I may try reading more of his stuff in the future (I hear The Road is supposed to be great). Up next, however, I'll be reading some more Stephen King.

(07-26-2018 01:52 PM)Dulceácido Wrote:  I need a support group. i am currently reading 6 fucking books and I don't want to stop reading any of them, yet I can't finish one because I start another.

This clearly has to stop. Is there a 12-step program for this addiction? I mean, is there a point in my history where I will have to apologize, personally, to all the authors that i've never read their books. What about the one's I did read? Should they feel guilty?

Anyway, in no particular order, the books I am currently reading:

12 Rules of Life--Jordan Perterson
Ordinary Men--Christopher R. Browning
The Truth--Neil Strauss
Death By A Thousand Sluts--John Bodi
Make Your Bed--Admiral William McCraven
The Republic--Plato
Meditations--Marcus Aurelius

Fuck that's actually 7 books. I must've started one without knowing.

Quick breakdown: 12 rules of life... pretty much mandatory reading. Ordinary Men... Quite disturbing. lots of middle-aged German auxiliary police sent to post-war Poland to control the population, and then they just go completely bat-shit insane and become the most ruthless occupiers ever. Pretty grim. The Truth... I dunno. Kinda half-way through it, I got into Game because of Neil Strauss, so it's kinda weird seeing where it landed him. Pretty happy with it so far. Death By A Thousand Sluts--haven't gotten into that one so much yet, but I bought it having read about it here on the forum, so I'm pretty sure it's gonna be good. Make Your Bed.... Popular spinoff from this commencement speech:





The Republic and Meditations are just required reading... You're missing out if you haven't read either. I've read both multiple times (twice for the Republic and 6 times Meditations).

I’ll help you with your 7 books, ditch the truth by Strauss. You won’t like what he’s become. He might have got you in the door but it doesn’t mean he walked through it himself.

It makes sense as an RooshV forum member I have read:

Bang
Day Bang
Bang Poland
Bang Iceland
Don't Bang Latvia

Poosy Paradise was the latest I have finished.

These were all part of the Roosh's life work which if I recall correctly was 37 USD.

There's only so much I can do to squeeze the battery life out of something like a smartphone or template so I thought about getting a Kindle.

I wouldn't need a waterproof kindle but something on the lower end as I may need one for its longer battery life for my long flights all the way from Australia on the arse end of the world.