Reading Tab

Well, I don't doubt that you understand Hayek's ideology better than I do, since I've read one of his books once, casually (incidentally, one of the reasons I'm hesitant to get drawn into a detailed debate over his philosophy). As for your paraphrase of Keynes (?) on "neutrality", I think you're being a bit too harsh. As you suggest, it can be used as a smokescreen for various ideological assumptions (both examined and un-examined), and there's nothing intrinsically more correct about a "moderate" opinion, but a lot of the time it's just about not wanting to pick a strong position on the basis of too little, too conflicting, or too blatantly loaded sources of information and arguments. There's also a distinction to be made between neutrality and what historian Thomas Haskell calls "asceticism". Here's what he says:

"The very possibility of historical scholarship as an enterprise distinct from propaganda requires of its practitioners that vital minimum of ascetic self-discipline that enables a person to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and most important of all, suspend or bracket one's own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers." - Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream

By way of example, here's what I mean by not being an ideologue:

Since you yourself said that in an earlier post (even though you quickly wrote it off to the self-sacrificing nature of "Germanic people"), I suspect you agree with me that it's both possible and desirable to be less of an one.

Having re-read your last post a couple times now, my opinion has changed somewhat, but I'm still a bit confused by your terminology and rhetorical style (the fuzzy, politically-loaded modern use of terms like "liberalism" and "socialism" doesn't help either). In your last reply to PG you were careful to distinguish "socialism" - which advocates "high levels of government control" - from just any level of control, and it seems from the above that you might also distinguish various cases of "social democracy". I wonder if you're not shifting the line somewhat though, when you say socialism is "the dominant ideology of academia". When you make this statement in terms of ideological purity (enemies, those menacing tentacles) you blur the distinction between "socialist" and "socialist influence" that you claim is essential to understanding you correctly.

I guess I wasn't careful enough in my wording. My point just was that PG statement that Hayek didn't care for the commoners was a reflection of the influence of socialist ideology on the educational system.

And yes everybody is an "ideologue", since everything everybody say about anything has an underlying philosophical model. Some are just more aware of their models than others. Keynes said that about economic philosophies but it essentially applies to everything. For example, you regard my comment on Sweden's welfare state as not being ideological but that is because it agrees with your ideology: not ideological to you means that it fits into your ideology.

Some of the stuff I have been reading since my last update:

Cardcaptor Sakura - 10 chapters, 400 pages



Classic shoujo manga. It has been fun so far but nothing that special.

Monster - 400 pages



While I had a Urasawa manga in my top 10 novels of all time I actually haven't read anything else by him at that point in time. This work so far is perhaps the most entertaining of his.

A-Channel - 10 chapters, 60 pages



Really generic comedy manga featuring moe girls. It's ok as simple entertainment but nothing to keep my attention for long periods of time. As result I could only read 10 chapters of it so far.

A Bride Story - 15 chapters, 600 pages



Continuing my read of this well regarded title. It has been great so far and I expect more great things to come soon. The art is exquisite and the characters fell like real people. It also is very realistic in it's portrayal of 19th century central asian life.

The World Only God Knows - 15 chapters, 300 pages



Very otaku style manga about a 17 year old boy whose life consists of playing dating videogames. He then is taked by a goddess who assumes the identify of sister to make several girls fall in love with him and he uses the techniques he learned from playing dating videogames to do so with great success.

Inherit the Stars - 10 chapters, 300 pages



Very scientific style sci-fi manga. It's pure science fiction because there is virtually no character development. Still highly interesting for the scenarios it thinks about, it is a direct adaptation of a British science fiction novel

Berserk - 1 vol., 200 pages



Started, finally, reading this epic manga, one of the most popular manga of all time. Like Cardcaptor Sakura, a classic whose movies and TV series adaptions I know but I haven't read the originals, yet! Time to correct this mistake.

Seven Soldiers of Victory (the Grant Morrison one)



Read the first 200 pages of it. But decided to drop it, it's really mediocre storytelling and the multiple stories are each poorly developed and fail to grab my attention.

Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent

As a 6ft-tall tomboy lesbian, Norah Vincent had some assets in her favour when she decided to pass as a man. The greatest strengths she brings to the bowling dens, monasteries and strip clubs she inhabits, however, are an open mind and a keen eye for human detail.

It's fascinating to see her live within the trappings of male lifestyle, examining her own stereotypes, and those that others now apply to her. Her discoveries aren't revolutionary, but are all the better for feeling familiar and accurate, and all the more interesting for being passed through both male and female filters.

She lays her finger on a key component of male interaction early on: the way conflict avoidance probably underlies the space-giving taciturness, curtailed-eye-contact and general bro-bonding so often seen in male rituals. Some of the rhythms of these norms, as she lives amongst them, were like an unspoken language that needed decoding for her. And given men often think we're quite straight-forward, and that any bruskness plays a part in that, that came as an eye-opener. It seems we both require the other sex to be mind readers at times .

At no point does she hang her experiences on one explanatory model though. She doesn't over-extrapolate or belabour thoughts of this nature. She's at her most philosophical when potential friends and allies are in short supply, leaving her to theorise, but even then she leans towards constructive conclusions. (Her stray thought that strip club devotees might desire baby doll models to avoid desecrating real womanhood, IE the women in their lives they still cherish, is perhaps almost too generous!)

There are some great characters met along the way, who help her (sometimes unwittingly, sometimes in collusion) appreciate the novel restrictions and advantages of male life. The avuncular monk who fit her bowling buddy's wry description to a tee: "He doesn't need Head and Shoulders, he needs Neck and Chest too". The failed Bulgarian tennis pro snarling through the salesman scene. The archetypal self-help guru touting male ego, not as a totemic beast as she first thinks, but as a construct in which men get easily enmeshed.

I normally find gender projects infuriating in one form or another, but what really elevates the book is her even-handidness throughout. She 'checks her own privilege', to use that aggravating phrase, and appreciates the deficits of being male. Perhaps in making firm friends along the way she humanises what could have been a purely theoretical and distanced project. Perhaps it's because she learns as much about herself as she does about men. For whatever reason the end product feels very constructive, and despite being a very personal journey, like an inclusive look at some local American humanity.

-

__________________
Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

That book looks really interesting.

It's one of those great finds that's an accessible pleasure to read but also interesting and informative to boot.

I didn't go into its flaws too much, because she acknowledges them herself throughout the book. Great, brave project

*EDIT*

I've got round to adding my reviews to Goodreads. They're here if anyone's looking for some old recos

Things I'll be studying 2015-2016 in Literature!













Definitely look forward to it! I had to choose Fried Green Tomatoes and The Handmaid's Tale

I tried to write a review on Goodreads in English for Plato's Republic, this is what it is, I'd like to know is the language is understandable (I read the book in french so it's a little hard to review it in English haha)


I did it, I read The Republic from start to finish and I have to admit that it was quite an enjoyable read. I won't go in details explaining the arguments of each book, but I would still like to make some remarks about what I knew and what surprised me. Before reading it I was quite knowledgeable about Plato, I knew of his theory of the forms, of the idea of the philosopher king as the ruler of the city, of the 3 different class of people in his ideal society, of the allegory of the cave, etc. So it wasn't surprising for me to read those different concepts, but it made them much clearer and it linked them together. I also had heard that Plato was some sort of feminist, which is part true I would say. Beause yes he defends that women should have the same education and chances then men in society, that the distinction between men and women if we talk about the capacity to be a philosopher king is simillar to the one of a long haired man and of a bald man. However he says somewhere in the book (I don't remember exactly, probably in the last 3 books) something like that woman are at home, it's in their nature of something (I'm saying this from my memory I might be wrong)which isn't exactly the conception we have today of feminism. And I personally think this obsession with natural ability is the biggest flaw in Plato's thinking, he really believes that people are naturally suited to be philosophers or not, for instance he thinks that babu born from a union of lower class citizens shouldn't be kept in the city because they have less chance to have the capacity to be a good soldier or philosopher.

But what I really got out of this book that isn't really talked about in the philosophy class I've had or in books about the history of philosophy I've read is that it is a book non only about searching for what is just, what is the concept of good, but moreso how to concretely apply it to an ideal city. And his answer is through education, to form the minds of the people according to the ideal form of the good. For instance, he would censor Homer because he represents the gods in situations that don't make them look good and that he doesn't really care for truth. (he makes the same criticism of classical greek tragedy). Most modern minds would say his idea of education and of the city is close to a totalitarian state, but I slightly disagree. I can't say this claim is false because what Plato describes is in fact close to our modern totalitarian states, but the difference, I think, is the motivation behind it. Plato bases himself on his theory of the forms which, even if it's probably false is rationally explained. This idea that something in any case is true, hence that this absolute truth is more important then what the majority thinks is not important, but that if they accept the decision of the philosopher kings they would be happier because it is the truth.

Rousseau said it was the best book written about education in Emile and I agree, he controls what the young minds will read, see in order to make them virtuous, to develop their mind so that they might be philosophers, sure I disagree with it, but I still it fascinating.

Overall, I'd say that most modern minds would disagree with Plato's conclusions, but that it is still highly enlightning to read his work. He talks about issues that are still relevent today, the human condition is still simillar in a lot of way and Plato questions ourselves about it. In the 8th book he makes a very good interesting portrait of oligarchy and democracy, how, because of the research of wealth, people are striving for material gains rather then virtue, hence we tend to be more unjust because we think our personnal gain rather then what we should do.

__________________
I do not speak english perfectly so expect some mistakes here and there in my messages

Another month, another batch of stuff read.

fiction
non-fiction
articles
comics
re-read


Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo
Unspeak by Steven Poole
Okupant X by Gary Panter
Figgs & Phantoms by Ellen Raskin
W the Whore Makes Her Tracks by Anke Feuchtenberger
GoGo Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto
The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology - (Evolution and Cognition, 2000, Vol. 6, No. 2) - Jaak Panksepp
Cotton, climate and colonialism in Dharwar, western India, 1840–1880 (Journal of Historical Geography 38-1, 2012) - Sandip Hazareesingh
Getting Congo Right (World Affairs, September/October 2013) - Armin Rosen
Dr. Naveh, or, how I learned to stop worrying and walk through walls (Haaretz, 10/25/07) - Yotam Feldman
How Rwanda's Paul Kagame Exploits U.S. Guilt (WSJ, 4/19/14) - Howard French



The Frontier Within: Essays by Kobo Abe
The Martian by Andy Weir
Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood
Just After Sunset by Stephen King


Why isn't everyone an evolutionary psychologist? - (Frontiers in Psychology, 8/27/14) - Darren Burke

I'm almost finished with Marlon Brando's autobiography - "Songs My Mother Taught Me"

Meh, I haven't read sh*t in the last weeks. Well now I don't have the luxury to spend hours reading anymore since I have to listen to metal.

You can't read manga while listening to metal? (Maybe this one for example)

I first dug into Michael Nyman's discography while reading Popeye strips...

I've been mentally vegetating for a while. Been binge watching a bunch of TV shows. It's really doing me no good so I've decided to stop that and go back to my former habit of reading in the evenings.

Maybe this isn't much better but it's a good read so far:
Cold Moon Over Babylon.

I'm also reading:
Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt .
Introducing Python: Modern Computing in Simple Packages

While I am focusing on the music I can't think of other things.

Assigned reading for a watercolor class:

All of these are . Cronon's book is perhaps the best of the 50 or so (non-comic) books I've read so far this year.



Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon

"We know next to nothing about most of the Europeans who journeyed to New England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and we can only make the crudest of inferences about how Indians responded to them. Yet there can be no doubt that contacts between the two groups were extensive. Explorers who were greeted by Indians speaking French, English, or Basque could have few illusions about being the first European visitors in the area. When the Pilgrims first landed in Cape Cod in 1620, they discovered "a place like a grave" covered with wooden boards. Digging it up, they found layer upon layer of household goods, the personal possessions that Indians ordinarily buried with their dead: mats, bowls, trays, dishes, a bow, and two bundles. In the smaller of the two bundles was a quantity of sweet-smelling red powder in which were the bones of a young child, wrapped in beads and accompanied by an undersized bow. Still, what troubled the graverobbers were not these Indian things, many of which they took, but the contents of the larger bundle. There, in the same red powder, were the remnants of a man: some of the flesh remained on the bones, and they realized with a shock that "the skull had fine yellow haire still on it." With the bones, "bound up in a saylers canvas Casacke, and payre of cloth breeches," were a knife, a needle, and "two or three old iron things," evidently the dead man's most personal belongings. A blond European Sailor, shipwrecked or abandoned on the Massachusetts coast, had lived as an Indian, had perhaps fathered an Indian child, and had been buried in an Indian grave. His circumstances may or may not have been unusual--even this we cannot know--but they betokened an already long and continuing exchange between peoples on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
It was anonymous Europeans like the dead sailor in the Cape Cod grave who helped bring about the single most dramatic ecological change in Indian lives, one whose full significance historians have only recently come to understand. Of all the many organisms Europeans carried to America, none of them were more devastating to the Indians than the Old World diseases[...]"

The Genocides by Thomas Disch
Hip Hop Family Tree vol. 1 by Ed Piskor (comic)
The Marauders by Tom Cooper

+++++
My favorite book of all time

Ten Million Aliens by Simon Barnes

Mosquitoes kill more people than lions and elephants and hippos combined; the tsetse fly, which gives a human a bite of piercing pain that lasts about half a second, has devastated communities because of the cattle disease it can carry, and also the sleeping sickness it can impart to humans. "God bless the tsetse fly," old Norman Carr, the founding father of Zambian conservation, used to say. "Without them we'd all be cattle ranchers." The Tsetses make the valley a no-go area for domestic cattle, so the place has stayed wild: a story true of many of Africa's great national parks.

I don't know anything about Zambian ecology or conservation, so maybe this (last bit about the tsetse fly) is correct, but it sounds a little suspect to me. In Mkomazi, Tanzania, for example, the actual causation between cattle ranching and gazetting is reversed IIRC. By evicting ranchers (some of whom do things like selectively burning underbrush), National Parks can actually create the conditions for Tsetses to move in. In spite of this and some other annoyances I still enjoyed the book as a nice leisurely way to pick up random facts about animals.

Donald Duck: The Old Castle's Secret (The Carl Barks Library, #6)

This was my least favorite of the "Ducktales" comics that I've read so far, mainly because of In Darkest Africa. Some of the other stories were pretty good.

Well that's a pretty racist review