Post: #526

Adios America: The Left's Plan to Turn America Into a Third World Hellhole by Ann Coulter

I thought this was a excellent book. Coulter argues against immigration, both legal and illegal, due to cultural reasons. Her basic argue is that immigrants that are coming to the US are not from the west, but from poor third world countries, and they are importing their bad habits and leftists beliefs in the form of voting for the Democrats. She does note how immigrants are harming the environment, reduce workers wages and displace workers but her argument primarily rest on culture. She writes in a blunt, comedic style so this is an enjoyable read.

Post: #527

Just knocked down the third Harry Bosch book from Michael Connelly’s series, I am really being drawn to the book series; however there is something that really annoys me about Connolly’s character.

Throughout most of the books; Harry, the main character, is a rough, short worded, fallen-angle detective. He used to work in a coveted homicide department, until he shot an unarmed(albeit, serial killer) man without any witnesses or backup. He was then demoted to the Hollywood homicide office for ‘punishment’, mostly it was politics. He was also raised in a foster home.

So he overall is a very “red pill” type guy, however this is what gets me:

Every single time a women walks into the door, complete 180! Its always quotes like “I felt like telling her that I wanted to stay here for eternity and sit with her, but I knew I couldn’t”

Yuck! However, if you can tolerate that then I highly recommend the series.

Post: #528

After a long time, my health's recovered enough where I can focus to the point of reading full books, not just short blog posts. So today I read a random J-horror book I own, called 七つの怖い扉, or, as I will translate it, "Seven Doors of Terror". It's a collection of seven horror stories by some of Japan's better writers, including the guy who wrote "The Ring".

The stories themselves weren't very scary, but what stood out to me was the quality of the writing by some authors I'd never heard of. Nonami Asa's description of an abandoned villa in the Japanese mountains was so real I could almost hear the wind and feel the drafts as I read it. Mariko Koeike description of an old Japanese inn during a thunderstorm was amazing too. The way the Japanese language allows them to write about things like color and light never ceases to amaze me.

The book also confirms my earlier suspicion that the guy who wrote "The Ring" is a hack. Most overrated writer in history, if you ask me.



If anyone else here reads Japanese well enough to enjoy a book like this, I give it a mild recommendation. I paid the equivalent of about 2$ for my copy, which seems about right.

Post: #529

(11-29-2016 05:24 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  After a long time, my health's recovered enough where I can focus to the point of reading full books, not just short blog posts. So today I read a random J-horror book I own, called 七つの怖い扉, or, as I will translate it, "Seven Doors of Terror". It's a collection of seven horror stories by some of Japan's better writers, including the guy who wrote "The Ring".

The stories themselves weren't very scary, but what stood out to me was the quality of the writing by some authors I'd never heard of. Nonami Asa's description of an abandoned villa in the Japanese mountains was so real I could almost hear the wind and feel the drafts as I read it. Mariko Koeike description of an old Japanese inn during a thunderstorm was amazing too. The way the Japanese language allows them to write about things like color and light never ceases to amaze me.

The book also confirms my earlier suspicion that the guy who wrote "The Ring" is a hack. Most overrated writer in history, if you ask me.



If anyone else here reads Japanese well enough to enjoy a book like this, I give it a mild recommendation. I paid the equivalent of about 2$ for my copy, which seems about right.

Man, maybe I gotta learn Japanese. Do they have an English translation you know of? If the descriptiveness is due to the language it might not be worth it anyway...

Now you got me contemplating a Japanese edition of Rosetta Stone!

Post: #530

Hmm, I'd be surprised if there was one. It's not a well known book; I'd never even heard of it till I saw it on the shelves of a used bookstore a while ago. It's got a story by Baku Yumemakura, one of my favorite authors, which is why I picked it up. Yumemakura's been writing horror and fantasy stories for almost 30 years now, and one of his most popular series was a combination of early-80s cyberpunk and traditional Japanese religion, so there's psychics using MS-DOS 1.0 computers with 15 kilohertz processors to dive into the minds of esoteric buddhist monks. Those books were written all the way back when 15khz really was a fast computer, so there's no a trace of parody about them. Tons of fun.


Learning to read Japanese to the point where you could read something like this is a long road. I know quite a few professional translators who I'm not sure could do it. But it's a very rewarding one, not in the least because Japanese chicks are hot and very often slutty. I'd encourage you to try it, if you think you'd be interested!

Post: #531

End of Average by Todd Rose

Emphasizes the problems with using the average as a metric as any given individual is rarely ever average when just looking at a few parameters.

Post: #532

Just finished Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent who made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West.

This should be a RVF stable. Richard Burton was one of the greatest explorers and frontier-breakers in history. He did as the title read; made a pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise (under penalty of death), discovered the karma sutra, translated the Arabian Nights, as well as, being a polyglot of 29 languages/dialects, being an exulted Sufi, Shia, and extremely well-versed in nearly every religion of the world, being the first white man to enter Harar, being the first man to organize an expedition in search of the source of the Nile, and being a prolific writer of 30+ works, which fastidiously documented his ventures, each of which would have been the pentacle of another man's entire career.

The biographer, Edward Rice, does an incredible job of weaving together the storyline and it reads a bit similar to Manchester's Churchill biography. This was particularly difficult as Burton's wife burned the majority of his works.

For all the positives, Burton had more than his fair share of adversity. He survived multiple assassination attempts, had his reputation perpetually slandered and tarnished by enviable men, married a Roman Catholic I'm sure the RVF would disapprove of, and often got caught in the cobweb of Victorian England, a time-period and location I suspect he didn't belong.

The book's ~480 pages and nearly every paragraph is quotable. Took me the better part of a month to knock it down.

My favorite quotes:

"Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy"

"Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause.
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws."

"Burton suddenly decided to quit Alexandria because he was bored. He had sensed "a paroxysm of ennui coming on by slow degrees....The man wants to wander, and he must do so, or he shall die.""

Post: #533

Dear White America by Tim Wise

I don't agree with his world view but decided to give this a read to be familiar with arguments from the other side. I think this book would be off putting/unconvincing to conservative and moderates and even some liberals while reinforcing the views of people who already agree with him.

1. Quite a few of his sources are biased. He cites Media Matters, Daily Kos and Huffington Post for quoting conservatives. Which is kind of like quoting Breitbart for an objective view on Hillary Clinton.

2. While citing many studies that indicate racial discrimination exists, he does not demonstrate that discrimination is preventing minorities for achieving success. For example, he cites a study by Alfred Blumrosen indicating that 1.2 million acts of job discrimination occur each year. Let's assume that's true. The relevant question is "how much discrimination impact earnings?" Even if there is a lot of discrimination against minorities, so long as there is a significant sector of the labor market that does not discriminate, it will not affect your earnings. And if that is the case, why aren't minorities clustering in the segments of the labor market that don't discriminate against them?

3. He engages in the fallacy that Thomas Sowell calls "residual discrimination", which is assuming that if there is a difference between racial groups after all factors have been accounted for, it's due to discrimination. But that assumes that all the factors that could causes a difference in outcome have been correctly identified and quantified. However, some factors, like IQ and ambition, cannot be determined by a many studies.

4. I think he downplays culture and aggregates ethnic groups when convenient. Nigerians and American blacks are both "black" but he does not explain why Nigerians on average make $61,000 a year while American blacks make in average $38,000. He doesn't address that kind of counter argument at all. He would likely say that Nigerians are recent immigrants who were successful in their home country, but even successful Nigerians in Nigeria earn less that the average American. He just aggregates theses groups as "black" and let's that be the end of his analysis.

5. He assigns motives of racism to people who don't favor policies he likes. There are reasons to be against immigration and some welfare state policies (policies he cites in the book) that don't involve racism. But even if racism is in part a motivating factor, that does not mean such opposition is wrong. He just assumes these are good policies.

6. Some of his reasoning is questionable. He explains the highly illegitimacy rate of black women due to married black women having less kids. It seems hardly believable that the illegitimacy rate could increase 50 percentage points from the 1960s to now only because married black women had less children.

I did not find the book to be convincing. However the book still may be worth reading if you want to read about the left wing view on race.

Post: #534

Red or Dead by David Peace.

King Shankly is too hard too ignore. Peace's Hemmingway style of writing is intriguing nevertheless

Post: #535

Pre-suasion, Robert Cialdini.

I got this off the Scott Adams persuasion list. And on reflection, I think the book had some value, but with some important things to note ahead of time.

(1) Adams may have a conflict of interest, and he hasn't disclosed it. Pre-suasion contains a Dilbert cartoon. That's a potential conflict of interest: there's a potential that Adams is getting a cut of the sales of the book via licensing of that cartoon (Adams holds the copyright on Dilbert, therefore, if Adams got paid for allowing a Dilbert cartoon to appear in the book, it probably behooves him to disclose that before endorsing the book, since we don't know whether Adams is endorsing the book for its content or for its potential gain to himself.)

That aside, Cialdini's own books teach us an important psychological mechanism: reciprocity, i.e., if someone gives you something, you tend to want to give them something back ... and not necessarily something of equal value. This desire can be entirely unwilled on your part, which is why provisions for disclosure of conflict of interest exist: because we know that psychologically you may have nothing but the best of intentions and yet succumb. It may well be that Adams was more prepared to endorse or trumpet the book because Cialdini -- a guy he clearly greatly respects -- asked him to use some of his artwork in the book.

(2) The book's central subject is based on a not-completely-replicated field of study. "Pre-suasion" is Cialdini's relabelling of a field of behavioural psychology called the study of priming. That is, if immediately before you ask someone for something, you expose them to a stimulus that creates a favourable association with your request, you raise the odds of that request being granted. Some of the more long-term aspects of this research have not been replicated. It's such that Daniel Kahneman -- who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow and, for what it's worth, got a Nobel prize for it -- wrote an open letter to priming researchers basically telling them to seriously tighten up their experimental standards if they didn't want the field to go the way of subliminal perception or dissonance reduction. Cialdini makes no assertion of the questions being raised about the research, which either makes him unaware of them (bad) or aware and leaving them out (worse). So again, take with a grain of salt.

As for the book itself:

(1) It's what I would call a very thick coffee-table book. It is not an academic text and it's not a truly instructional book on pre-suasion or persuasion, anymore than Influence was. It's a lot more like books such as Duhigg's The Power of Habit: a text documentary on a field of science with lots of real-world examples designed to make the average Atlantic reader go "Ooh" and "aah", just like Influence is. You could cut down its pure persuasion advice down to a couple of written pages, though I suppose the real-life illustrations might inspire you to think about how you could use similar principles in your own life. It is a very similar style and construction to Influence, so go in with that in mind.

(2) That said, I'm also reading Carmen Simon's Impossible to Ignore, and I did find myself underlining sections of Pre-suasion telling myself that those sections were corollaries to, or context for, the things Simon says in her book. This at least is useful since it points to that large common core of thought and research that is typified by most of the books on Adams' list.

(3) (a) The book is also unintentionally hilarious when you go in with the theory that Hillary Clinton was using Cialdini as a resource on her Presidential campaign. Cialdini points out that untrustworthiness is one of the biggest pre-suasion hurdles to overcome, that it's extremely difficult to override an audience's perception that you are dishonest. Trump's campaign had the perfect cue to hit Clinton with: "Crooked Hillary".

(3) (b) On a related note, Cialdini bangs the drum pretty hard later in the book about a seventh principle of persuasion called unity. (Have you read Influence? Then you've read abut the first six, although Cialdini does recapitulate them here). He runs the idea that we are persuasive if we act together, think of ourselves as part of a group -- this is a big reason why churches often have people sing hymns as one, because it makes them more amenable to persuasion as the group sinks into "unity" with one another. This is an interesting, if disturbing thought, since it is now apparent this was a prime weapon of the Left for the last thirty, forty years.

On the other hand: "Music possesses rare synchronising power", according to Cialdini. "Listeners can become easily aligned with one another along motoric, sensory, vocal, and emotional dimensions -- a state of affairs that leads to familiar markers of unity such as self-other merging, social cohesion, and supportive conduct." You will remember Trump's rallies: classic rock -- music a large proportion of American voters know -- at high volume, played ahead of Trump's arrival.

You will also remember Clinton's campaign: Stronger Together. I'm With Her -->. The problem being, as with all persuasion principles, that it can be very easy to break the spell. In Clinton's case, I think that moment was when she lost her head over Pepe and called half of America a basket of deplorables. Trump was very smart to capitalise on that because it not only made people in his group more loyal to him, it also smashed Clinton's attempts at persuasion through unity. From that point on, nobody could take Clinton seriously when she suggested she wanted to govern for all Americans together: she was blatantly partisan.

(4) One of the most interesting and chilling parts of the book for me was this revelation, from psycholinguist Gun Semin: the main purpose of speech is to direct listeners' attention to a select sector of reality. Once that is accomplished, the listeners' existing associations to the now-spotlighted sector will take over to determine the reation.

That is, language itself is persuasion. It is a means for inducing recipients to share that conception or at least act in accord to it. Cialdini mentioned a hospital that had outright removed all "violent" language from its lexicon, right down to slides no longer containing bullet points but instead calling them "information points".

This is chilling because the research provides empirical evidence for exactly the concept Orwell warned us about in fiction: Newspeak, also known as political correctness. The assault of the Left on our language was deliberate and targeted.

Consider the fact that you most likely use the word "gender" to refer to male or female sexes. The word gender has been used since the 14th century as a grammatical term, referring to classes of noun designated as masculine, feminine, or neuter in some languages. The sense ‘the state of being male or female’ has also been used since the 14th century, but this did not become common until the mid 20th century. Although the words gender and sex both have the sense ‘the state of being male or female’, they are typically used in slightly different ways: sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender refers to cultural or social ones.

Why did the word "gender" become popular in the mid-20th century? Essentially because the Left wanted to destroy traditional families. Part of that campaign included an assault on the language itself. Now we use the word gender instead of sex. It was part of a persuasion effort against society at large.

Getting back to Cialdini, though: there is some brief expansion on some of the things he said in Influence, but Influence is probably the weightier of the two for the new reader to persuasion, and I'd tend to recommend more hands-on stuff like Gerry Spence's books.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #536

A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings by Knut Hamsun.

One of Hamsun's best, this book was written in 1909 when Hamsun was 50 years old.
It describes him working as a day laborer on farms, and contains beautiful meditations on man and nature.

- I am in no hurry, it does not matter where I am.

Post: #537

Impossible to Ignore, Carmen Simon.

Well, fuck me, finally someone brought out a book on persuasion with some actionable rules, formulas and advice to work on.

Cialdini and Simon strike me as looking at the same body of evidence, just from entirely different viewpoints. Robert Cialdini takes most of his studies on influence from the outside in -- he tends to shadow persuasion practitioners and work out what effects are at play from there.

Simon looks at persuasion from the inside out: she is a cognitive neuroscientist who seems to take a more biological or neurological approach to persuasion and memory than Cialdini does, maybe understandable since his PhD is in psychology. The contrast between this book and Influence are sort of like a racing car driver telling you about the parts of a car and when you should or shouldn't shift gears up and down and a mechanic who takes you under the hood, shows you where the gearbox is and the cogs in it, then tells you which gears you use and in what proportion.

Simon's work is probably more toward the presentational/text/marketing side of persuasion than day-to-day interactions, but it's a lot more specific and I think a lot more actionable than Cialdini's insights are. The underlying principle at work is that we act based on our memories; therefore, if you would influence someone, you must get in their memory, and these are the ways you do it.

She explains the concepts involved and gives brief examples, and throughout the process tells you what questions to ask yourself or what considerations to give to your content. I found myself reading different points and thinking "Holy shit, Mike Cernovich uses that strategy, though he might not have actually read the book at all", and similar.

Simon breaks it down right into a formula: 15 elements that influence memory -- novelty, distinctiveness, emotion, familiarity, surprise, repetition, etc, etc -- and it's memory that counts when you're selling something or want to be on people's minds -- of which 9 elements put into a presentation seem to create lasting memories in people. She even gives you a worksheet at the end to evaluate your presentations/content against and use it to optimise these elements. I'm getting into the practice of summarising and note-taking the books I want to refer to again, and I took 40 pages of notes on this sucker. It even has applicability for fiction writers, because she gets into what makes text memorable, and what turns readers off. There is a lot to learn here.

This is a much better book than Influence, though I'd still recommend Cialdini as an introduction to persuasive techniques. Read this fucking book, it's insanely good and insanely specific as no book I've read on persuasion thus far is.

On top of that, Carmen Simon is a fucking Wall survivor!



That's her at 42. WB.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #538

Finally finished reading 'The 48 Laws of Power' By Robert Greene, started it about 6 months ago on and off reading it. It is a valuable book with great insights so I enjoyed taking the time to read a few pages or a chapter then ponder it for a while. There are many valuable points and gems within the book, my favorite quote has to be this:

'The most ordinary cause of people's mistakes is their being too much frightened at the present danger, and not enough so at that which is remote.'

I've read a lot of books and this is definitely my favorite one as it provided me with high value insights and viewpoints.

Post: #539

Finished Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl a couple of weeks ago, really put certain things into perspective for me (my dad recommended it to me). There are a lot of valuable points contained within the harrowing story of a concentration camp survivor. It's pretty difficult at times (due to the raw savagery of the concentration camp environment) but it's a great read.

Currently going through Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

Post: #540

Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell

Definitely must reads in today's society.

Now starting Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Post: #541

   


Taken from wikipedia

Quote: State of Fear is a 2004 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton in which eco-terrorists plot mass murder to publicize the danger of global warming. Despite being a work of fiction, the book contains many graphs and footnotes, two appendices, and a twenty-page bibliography in support of Crichton's beliefs about global warming. Climate scientists, science journalists, environmental groups and science advocacy organisations dispute Crichton's views on the science as being error-filled and distorted,[1][2][3][4][5][6] and it was described as "pure porn for global warming deniers" by journalist Chris Mooney.[7]

The novel had an initial print run of 1.5 million copies and reached the #1 bestseller position at Amazon.com and #2 on the New York Times Best Seller list for one week in January 2005. The novel itself has garnered mixed reviews, with some literary reviewers stating that the book's presentation of facts and stance on the global warming debate detracted from the book's plot.

The book, while a work of fiction, plainly lays out how the media manipulates the public with exaggerated claims and falsehoods. Crichton's description of alpha/beta characteristics in men is on point and even shows the beta lawyer Peter grow and become more alpha as the book goes on. I don't think it was Crichton's intention for this to be but anyone who reads this forum and reads the book will see what I mean. I highly recommend it!

Post: #542

Just finished The Last Playboy about Porifrio Rubirosa. Needless to say, this one is a Manosphere staple. I heard a lot about it, and it lived up to the hype.

He was one of a kind. And although I would not follow his path per se (he preferred to marry rich women and then live off their income) he definitely had some elements of game that were worth taking note of: impeccable dress, sociable demeanor, in good shape, etc.

Also, it helps if you're hung like a horse (which he apparently was).

Post: #543

I just finished reading Mein Kampf in my local language and published before German lost the war, so it should be pretty authentic. I was surprised to see how many of the issues we are fighting now could already seen at that time. It also allows you to really get inside Hitler's head. Definitely worth a read at least once.

Post: #544

Three Body Problem
Liu Cixin

Post: #545

“James Rickards, The road to ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis”

a good read for those interested in world economy and what the future holds in term of your finance planning and wealth preservation.

the picture ain't rosy, prepare for the perfect storm that is approaching fast.

Post: #546

(12-04-2016 09:34 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:  Pre-suasion, Robert Cialdini.

I got this off the Scott Adams persuasion list. And on reflection, I think the book had some value, but with some important things to note ahead of time.

(1) Adams may have a conflict of interest, and he hasn't disclosed it. Pre-suasion contains a Dilbert cartoon. That's a potential conflict of interest: there's a potential that Adams is getting a cut of the sales of the book via licensing of that cartoon (Adams holds the copyright on Dilbert, therefore, if Adams got paid for allowing a Dilbert cartoon to appear in the book, it probably behooves him to disclose that before endorsing the book, since we don't know whether Adams is endorsing the book for its content or for its potential gain to himself.)

That aside, Cialdini's own books teach us an important psychological mechanism: reciprocity, i.e., if someone gives you something, you tend to want to give them something back ... and not necessarily something of equal value. This desire can be entirely unwilled on your part, which is why provisions for disclosure of conflict of interest exist: because we know that psychologically you may have nothing but the best of intentions and yet succumb. It may well be that Adams was more prepared to endorse or trumpet the book because Cialdini -- a guy he clearly greatly respects -- asked him to use some of his artwork in the book.

(2) The book's central subject is based on a not-completely-replicated field of study. "Pre-suasion" is Cialdini's relabelling of a field of behavioural psychology called the study of priming. That is, if immediately before you ask someone for something, you expose them to a stimulus that creates a favourable association with your request, you raise the odds of that request being granted. Some of the more long-term aspects of this research have not been replicated. It's such that Daniel Kahneman -- who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow and, for what it's worth, got a Nobel prize for it -- wrote an open letter to priming researchers basically telling them to seriously tighten up their experimental standards if they didn't want the field to go the way of subliminal perception or dissonance reduction. Cialdini makes no assertion of the questions being raised about the research, which either makes him unaware of them (bad) or aware and leaving them out (worse). So again, take with a grain of salt.

As for the book itself:

(1) It's what I would call a very thick coffee-table book. It is not an academic text and it's not a truly instructional book on pre-suasion or persuasion, anymore than Influence was. It's a lot more like books such as Duhigg's The Power of Habit: a text documentary on a field of science with lots of real-world examples designed to make the average Atlantic reader go "Ooh" and "aah", just like Influence is. You could cut down its pure persuasion advice down to a couple of written pages, though I suppose the real-life illustrations might inspire you to think about how you could use similar principles in your own life. It is a very similar style and construction to Influence, so go in with that in mind.

(2) That said, I'm also reading Carmen Simon's Impossible to Ignore, and I did find myself underlining sections of Pre-suasion telling myself that those sections were corollaries to, or context for, the things Simon says in her book. This at least is useful since it points to that large common core of thought and research that is typified by most of the books on Adams' list.

(3) (a) The book is also unintentionally hilarious when you go in with the theory that Hillary Clinton was using Cialdini as a resource on her Presidential campaign. Cialdini points out that untrustworthiness is one of the biggest pre-suasion hurdles to overcome, that it's extremely difficult to override an audience's perception that you are dishonest. Trump's campaign had the perfect cue to hit Clinton with: "Crooked Hillary".

(3) (b) On a related note, Cialdini bangs the drum pretty hard later in the book about a seventh principle of persuasion called unity. (Have you read Influence? Then you've read abut the first six, although Cialdini does recapitulate them here). He runs the idea that we are persuasive if we act together, think of ourselves as part of a group -- this is a big reason why churches often have people sing hymns as one, because it makes them more amenable to persuasion as the group sinks into "unity" with one another. This is an interesting, if disturbing thought, since it is now apparent this was a prime weapon of the Left for the last thirty, forty years.

On the other hand: "Music possesses rare synchronising power", according to Cialdini. "Listeners can become easily aligned with one another along motoric, sensory, vocal, and emotional dimensions -- a state of affairs that leads to familiar markers of unity such as self-other merging, social cohesion, and supportive conduct." You will remember Trump's rallies: classic rock -- music a large proportion of American voters know -- at high volume, played ahead of Trump's arrival.

You will also remember Clinton's campaign: Stronger Together. I'm With Her -->. The problem being, as with all persuasion principles, that it can be very easy to break the spell. In Clinton's case, I think that moment was when she lost her head over Pepe and called half of America a basket of deplorables. Trump was very smart to capitalise on that because it not only made people in his group more loyal to him, it also smashed Clinton's attempts at persuasion through unity. From that point on, nobody could take Clinton seriously when she suggested she wanted to govern for all Americans together: she was blatantly partisan.

(4) One of the most interesting and chilling parts of the book for me was this revelation, from psycholinguist Gun Semin: the main purpose of speech is to direct listeners' attention to a select sector of reality. Once that is accomplished, the listeners' existing associations to the now-spotlighted sector will take over to determine the reation.

That is, language itself is persuasion. It is a means for inducing recipients to share that conception or at least act in accord to it. Cialdini mentioned a hospital that had outright removed all "violent" language from its lexicon, right down to slides no longer containing bullet points but instead calling them "information points".

This is chilling because the research provides empirical evidence for exactly the concept Orwell warned us about in fiction: Newspeak, also known as political correctness. The assault of the Left on our language was deliberate and targeted.

Consider the fact that you most likely use the word "gender" to refer to male or female sexes. The word gender has been used since the 14th century as a grammatical term, referring to classes of noun designated as masculine, feminine, or neuter in some languages. The sense ‘the state of being male or female’ has also been used since the 14th century, but this did not become common until the mid 20th century. Although the words gender and sex both have the sense ‘the state of being male or female’, they are typically used in slightly different ways: sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender refers to cultural or social ones.

Why did the word "gender" become popular in the mid-20th century? Essentially because the Left wanted to destroy traditional families. Part of that campaign included an assault on the language itself. Now we use the word gender instead of sex. It was part of a persuasion effort against society at large.

Getting back to Cialdini, though: there is some brief expansion on some of the things he said in Influence, but Influence is probably the weightier of the two for the new reader to persuasion, and I'd tend to recommend more hands-on stuff like Gerry Spence's books.

this is a good review/criticism of Pre-Sausion, although to me it was interesting and had some things that could be useful. You are correct that Influence is a better book. You should be aware that there was a book in between these, Yes!, which had tons of anecdotes illustrating Influence. Pre-Suasion is an attempt to explore new ground, and while it does to some extent it also revisits much of these first two books.

As for Adams, I would assume he granted permission for the strip to be republished royalty free. Aside from cover photos or something, that is the typical arrangement.

Post: #547

The Brethren, by John Grisham, is about three former lawyers that are sentenced to hard time in a minimum security federal prison. They act as lawyers to settle any disputes that happen in the prison. This story includes two subplots, one involving the lawyer who helps deliver letters written by the prisoners posing as gay men to extort money from them. There is also another subplot involving a guy named Aaron Lake, who decides to run for President after the New Hampshire primaries.

The Associate, also by John Grisham, is about a guy who takes a job at a prestigious law firm in New York City. His life changes when an "FBI agent" meets up with him in a hotel room and shows him a tape that potentially implicates him for sexual assault. In order for the matter to go away, the "FBI agent" essentially blackmails the protagonist, Kyle McAvoy, into doing his nefarious bidding.

I don't know if anyone here is a Grisham fan, but he is a good writer and I recommend his books.

Post: #548

How to Archer: The Ultimate Guide to Espionage, Style, Women, and Cocktails Ever Written

It is a satirical book, but I found it for $1 on the kindle store, and being an avid Archer fan I decided to buy it.

Glad I did, it is Archer in book form. The comedy is the same, and it is a great book to take up time while waiting in line for an appointment, etc. I normally read philosophical books, so having either a fiction book(as stated in a previous post; I recommend the Bosch series), or a satire to read is always good to have in your library.

Post: #549

Just finished 'A Decent Ride' by Irvine Welsh. One of my favourite writers, he always brings that Scottish veneer to his writing and reps Edinburgh to the fullest. I see that he has now moved to Chicago so he incorporated an American character into his plot. I particularly love how he writes in the Scottish vernacular; I showed some pages to one of my American lizards and she couldn't make head or tails of it.

I almost feel like I'm part of some exclusive club when he writes.

Post: #550

I just finished Will Durant's The Lessons of History. It may have been recommended here on the forum - not sure.

Either way, an excellent read. Clear, direct with lots of examples from history. Durant criticizes the concept of equality, stating that there is no direct correlation in the natural world. So it's clear to see why his work is not more lauded; it is running counter to the current narrative of equalism.

I highly recommend it.