What are you reading?

Dalit

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I finished Twisted Scriptures and really liked it even though it made me a bit angry and sad because I've been in places fairly recently where Scriptures were twisted and where I would've had to check my brain and conscience at the door to continue with them, so I left. That's cognitive dissonance to me. I don't care how charismatic leadership seems. If you're being asked (implicitly, of course) to obey them blindly and not share nor use your critical thinking ability to point out how they're going down the wrong track, get the hell out of there.

So Twisted Scriptures is a great book.

Have almost finished X vs. Y and love the treatment of Clueless in it, among other things. How Clueless is a bridge between both X and Y generations.


But I love Josh/Mr. Knightley and didn't find Emma boring.

Started reading How to Be Alone by Lane Moore and it's messed up yet interesting enough to continue reading it. Apparently, Moore is a comedienne of the self-deprecating variety and fell in love with her best girl friend in middle or high school. She came from a horrifically abusive family background though and I can relate to that a bit.

I saw The Chaperone recently because I'd read the book and really liked it. The book is better than the movie since there is more time to develop the characters in the book. Norma and Joseph's relationship seemed so rushed in the movie because it was. There's no time for a slow burn in a movie.

 
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polymoog

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You might like Peter Straub ...
So many things to read so few hours in the day
you, colonel, might be interested in reading practical ethics by peter singer if you havent done so already. ( i would recommend it as required reading to another person on the board, but that person is a good 15 years from even getting to that point...)

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/052143971X/ref=pd_cp_14_3?pd_rd_w=72UGE&pf_rd_p=ef4dc990-a9ca-4945-ae0b-f8d549198ed6&pf_rd_r=736HK9FJ980KDTJDHP6F&pd_rd_r=8b22b65b-6879-11e9-8627-41445435c50e&pd_rd_wg=ofZWv&pd_rd_i=052143971X&psc=1&refRID=736HK9FJ980KDTJDHP6F
 

Dalit

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Currently reading American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson and already like it just one chapter in.

Plan to read Golden Child by Claire Adam and Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami to give him another chance. It's supposed to be in homage to The Great Gatsby so it may be good even though the description on the book cover sounds like he wrote it while on an LSD trip possibly. Murakami is quite weird.
 

Hooligan69

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I am reading Anna Politkovskaya's Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches which is her final book published after her assassination on October 7, 2006. I'm curious to read the entry that some say may have led to her murder.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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you, colonel, might be interested in reading practical ethics by peter singer if you havent done so already. ( i would recommend it as required reading to another person on the board, but that person is a good 15 years from even getting to that point...)

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/052143971X/ref=pd_cp_14_3?pd_rd_w=72UGE&pf_rd_p=ef4dc990-a9ca-4945-ae0b-f8d549198ed6&pf_rd_r=736HK9FJ980KDTJDHP6F&pd_rd_r=8b22b65b-6879-11e9-8627-41445435c50e&pd_rd_wg=ofZWv&pd_rd_i=052143971X&psc=1&refRID=736HK9FJ980KDTJDHP6F
An interesting range of responses to “Practical Ethics”. Many loved it but as it expresses a utilitarian atheist perspective it is not universally popular. I don’t want to derail the thread but this review spoke quite intelligently to the subject:-



Philosophers of all stripes agree that the essence of ethics is that they are universal. For example, the Golden Rule grants other people the same ethical status that you give yourself. Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative is similar. In 'Practical Ethics' Peter Singer claims that preference utilitarianism does a better job of capturing the universal nature of ethics than these other approaches. His reasoning begins with the observation that ethics demands considering more than one's own self-interest. Therefore a truly universal system of ethics demands that we give equal consideration to everyone's interests. This principle of equal consideration of interests is the heart of Singer's preference utilitarianism. That sounds reasonable but the result is a deeply flawed and frankly immoral system of ethics.

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Objection #1: Expensive (and cheap) Preferences
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Utilitarianism upholds a moral duty to the poor based on the principle of declining marginal utility. That basically means that the more stuff you have the less value you will get from having even more. Another way of putting it is that the poor get more utility from money than the rich. Declining marginal utility can be modeled mathematically. A very simple utility function is the square root. If you have a million dollars then you will get one thousand utility points from it (the square root of a million is one thousand). But if you have two million dollars then you will only have a total of about 1414 utility (the square root of two million). In other words, you get 1000 utility from the first million but only 414 utility from the second million. Now suppose the government took that second million dollars away from you and gave it to someone who didn't have any money. Then you would each have 1000 utility. The total utility would be increased from 1414 to 2000. A socialist-style of income redistribution maximizes utility.

Got all that? Good. Now let's make it more complicated. Utility is simply a matter of personal opinion. Not everyone has the same utility function. Someone humble like Tiny Tim will be very happy with very few things and a thin gruel to eat. Someone like Paris Hilton will demand large mansions and expensive luxury goods to be equally happy. (You can model this mathematically but you really need exponential utility functions to do this so it is complicated). The upshot is that utilitarianism can create an unequal distribution of wealth, but not based on hard work and talent, but based on how much you crave luxury goods and social status. Utilitarianism forces the Tiny Tims to pay taxes to support Paris Hilton's opulent lifestyle. Robert Nozick famously dubbed people like Hilton utility monsters because they devour utility from the rest of us like monsters.

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Objection #2: Evil Preferences
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Utilitarianism does not distinguish between the slave owner's desire to own a slave and the slave's desire to be free. Now, the principle of declining marginal utility does come into play. The slave gets a lot more utility from his freedom than the slave owner would get from his labor. In practice extreme acts of oppression are usually blocked. But they remain theoretically possible. Utilitarians often dodge this question by arguing that slavery would lead to widespread fear throughout the population, thus lowering overall utility, but this is not true if we are talking about the enslavement of a minority ethnic group.

I agree that slavery is unlikely in practice but other acts of oppression are not. Consider the case of racist laws. Suppose that whites outnumber blacks ten to one. Let's also suppose that whites get 100 points of utility from oppressing blacks. Then laws which reduce the liberties of blacks such that blacks lose 1000 utility or less would, overall, maximize utility (the ten whites who each get 100 points, more than the 1000 points that the black person loses). Alternately, let's consider a racist version of Phillipa Foot's famous thought experiment: transplant. In the original case of transplant a healthy man is killed by his doctor so that his organs can be given to five healthy people. Foot used this as an argument against utilitarianism. Now let's strengthen it by supposing that a white person is dying. A black person is killed and his organs are given to the white person. Either way one person lives and one person dies so these preferences can be assumed to cancel out. Thus the racist majority tips the balance in the white man's favor. Utilitarianism can readily turn ethnic minorities into living, breathing organ farms. And lest you argue that the minority group would have a stronger preference to live, realize that the balance would actually tilt the other way. John Elster has shown that adaptive preferences - cases where people internalize the belief that they deserve their bad situation - are well supported in the literature (Elster, 1982).

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Objection #3: Incentives and the Lack of Personal Responsibility
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Utilitarianism does not include personal responsibility. In fact, the history of secular progressive political philosophy has been an evolution away from utilitarianism and towards more robust theories that at least marginally account for personal responsibility (Utilitarianism to John Rawls to Ronald Dworkin to John Roemer). Here is the point. Suppose I quit my job and watch TV all day while you work hard. Then utilitarianism says that you have to give me half your money (or more or less, depending on how Paris Hilton-like or Tiny Tim-like our preferences are). It doesn't matter that you earned your money and I didn't. In his entertaining book 'Reinventing the Bazaar' John McMillan points out that China basically put this socialist theory into practice. They abolished private property and had their peasants work the field collectively. They each got an equal share of the harvest, regardless of whether or not they worked hard or shirked on the job. Needless to say, people started to shirk. The Anhung province was once known as the granary of China but the people were forced to go begging on the streets for food. (For those readers who are familiar with the basic criticisms of free markets, this is a case of the tragedy of the commons). Eventually people from one village met in secret and agreed to divide the commune into individual lots. Output soared and soon the last commune was abolished.

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Objection #4: Government House Utilitarianism
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Many utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgewick, RM Hare, and Peter Singer take refuge from these objections by splitting utilitarianism into two levels. The "critical" or direct level of utilitarianism is as we've described it. The "intuitive" or indirect level consists of simple, easy-to-follow rules for the common masses to obey. Philosopher-kings like Peter Singer (and you! this book is an admittance to the club!) will pontificate from on high and create rules for the common masses. Just like in Plato's totalitarian Republic, the common masses will be told a Nobel Lie to keep them in their place. The lie is that we all have unalienable human rights. Peter Singer writes "The language of rights is a convenient political shorthand. It is even more valuable in the era of thirty second TV news clips." (Animal Liberation, p.8) Bernard Williams calls this government house utilitarianism, after the British colonies in India. The British elites who governed India did not believe in human rights, but they spread the word of them to the common masses because utilitarianism is too complicated to trust the plain folk. (Discuss amongst yourself: do we have government house utilitarianism in America today?)

Government house utilitarianism clearly solves some of the problems of utilitarianism. You couldn't have Chinese communes with them. Instead you'd need rules that enforce private property. But it doesn't fix other problems. If society is racist then it is the job of the philosopher-kings at the critical level to create racist laws. I suspect that it is only a matter of time before government house utilitarianism falls to the problem of expensive preferences. Advances in neuroeconomics (basically scanning people's brains under a PET scanner while they make choices) could tell us honestly whether or not people have expensive preferences like Paris Hilton or cheap preferences like Tiny Tim. The philosopher-kings should then redistribute income from Tiny Tim to Paris Hilton.

Another problem with government house utilitarianism is that utilitarians incoherently switch back and forth between the critical and intuitive levels. They point to the critical level to argue that utilitarianism has stronger moral duties than Judeo-Christian morality, and that it enforces a wider circle of moral consciousness [I'll bracket the abortion debate because this review is already getting long]. For example, utilitarians will argue that they support a stronger moral duty to help the poor in Africa. By contrast, rights-based forms of morality do not have a robust of a duty to the poor, it is argued. But when you (or Philippa Foot) point out the failures and unintended consequences of aid to Africa they take refuge in government house utilitarianism. By contrast, the Judeo-Christian influenced morality of natural rights is not incoherent. Instead it relies on the doctrine of acts and omissions to determine whether or not we have utilitarian-style moral duties to the others. Singer attempts to criticism the doctrine of acts and omissions here, but he does so poorly by cherry picking cases where there is no moral difference between an act and a corresponding omission.

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Further Reading
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Here is a short introduction to political philosophy in order of increasing levels of sophistication. I strongly recommend starting with the first book.

Political Philosophy: A Beginners' Guide for Students and Politicians
Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction
Theories of Justice: A Treatise on Social Justice, Vol. 1 (A Treatise on Social Justice; Vol. 1) (v. 1)
Theories of Distributive Justice (this one is heavy on math but has a great survey of the literature sprinkled in).

Those books are all from an essentially secular and progressive viewpoint. For a defense of rights-based morality from a traditional Christian perspective then check out:

Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach
 

Dalit

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I am reading Anna Politkovskaya's Is Journalism Worth Dying For? Final Dispatches which is her final book published after her assassination on October 7, 2006. I'm curious to read the entry that some say may have led to her murder.
That sounds most interesting. Let us know what you think when you've finished reading. :)
 
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I need to go back and pick up Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. It got a little slow in the middle and I never finished it.
“Windrip, a demagogue who is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values.”

Just turn on the news
 

Dalit

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Just in case anyone's interested, American Spy was great and so was Golden Child. Golden Child is quite disturbing.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/03/golden-child-claire-adam-review

Will get to Murakami after these:

Kristin Hannah's The Great Alone (set in Alaska)
Adam Morris's American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation
Polly Rosenwaike's Look How Happy I'm Making You

Edit: Rosenwaike's book of stories is not my favorite, yet "White Carnations" has been a pleasant story to read on Mother's Day.
 
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polymoog

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i am looking for a good, TRUE cold war spy book. ive already read up on kim philby.
any suggestions?
 

Dalit

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i am looking for a good, TRUE cold war spy book. ive already read up on kim philby.
any suggestions?
I don't know if this will help, but I'll also do some more research.

Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86 were excellent fictional (TV) accounts of the Cold War as it pertains to West and East Germany. Operation Able Archer was based on true accounts, as far as I know.

Here's a possible starting point: https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/5hcicz
Yes, I think I'll be getting Stasiland by Anna Funder.
 

polymoog

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Any books on this subject that you might recommend?
i can tell you what ive read....

i read: aSpy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, which was good, but it was from a point of view that i didnt care for. i suppose so much has been written about kim philby that the author (macintyre) needed to take a different angle, which in this case was the tale being told from the point of view of his friends, unknowing wife, and associates. when i had come across this book, i didnt know that before i bought it.

philby was a double agent in MI6, covertly working for the soviet union. since he had gone to elon (a UK private school for the aristocracy of england) and was from a well known family, he was never on the radar until severe damage was done during the cold war. this book covers how he fell into becoming a spy. its a fascinating story, but i was left wanting more detail. the writing was OK, but not great.
the book briefly describes james jesus angelton, who was philbys friend from the OSS/CIA. they would have dinner together and discuss intelligence which would be siphoned off to philbys soviet agent. when philby was discovered to be the secret agent, angelton became upset and paranoid and supposedly went on a mole hunt for years in the CIA. the book hints that his wife couldve been spying on him.


philby ends up not being able to hold together two separate secret lives, like most double agents and turns to drinking and depression until british intel closes in on him. the soviets pull him out and whisk him off to safety in the soviet union where he lives out the rest of his days.

the history of this one affair is fascinating, theres no doubt about it. there are undoubtedly tales of soviet agents spying for the west, but i doubt they will have the same bite.

this new one is out: The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War but its the same author as above (maybe ill give him another shot). i wanted more a barbara tuchman treatment of the narrative, which is to say replete with detail and hows and whys.
 
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Thunderian

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i am looking for a good, TRUE cold war spy book. ive already read up on kim philby.
any suggestions?
Norman Mailer's epic novel about the CIA, Harlot's Ghost, is fiction, but interwoven with real characters and events. Excellent read.
 

Z. T. Jacob

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Last night (morning) I picked up a book I started reading probably a year ago call Terror Factory by Trevor aaronson. It's about FBI "counter-terrorism" sting operations. The FBI basically manufactures terrorist threats by sending informants to people who otherwise would have zero capability of carrying out a terrorist attack and charging them with conspiracy to commit terrorism. In the Liberty City seven case, the main "terrorist" was a psychologically unstable man just trying to hustle some money. The guy thought he was able to bomb the seats tower in and cause it to fall into lake Michigan and cause a tsunami! They also threaten muslims based on immigration status and pending criminal charges to extort them into becoming FBI informants. It's pretty messed up, man.

A good nonfiction book.
https://trevoraaronson.com/book/
 

Dalit

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Just finished Milkman by Anna Burns and want to recommend it. In some sense, it's like 1984 with the constant surveillance and careful political correctness of society. None of the characters have names except for Nigel and Jason, and those characters are minor characters.

It's a bit of a tedious read with long chapters and almost a stream-of-consciousness style with few real paragraph breaks, yet it is oddly compelling.

The main character, known as "middle sister" primarily, is stalked by the Milkman and another man, yet the rumor-mill in her town judges her guilty even though she's done nothing wrong and he's the one stalking her. Her own mother judges her guilty and she stays silent and doesn't defend herself.

Anyway, it's interesting and won the 2018 Man Booker prize, which is a high honor.

 

Hooligan69

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I am curious to read Cam Simpson's book The Girl from Kathmandu: Twelve Dead Men and a Woman's Quest for Justice.

The shocking story of the massacre of a group of Nepalese men working as Defense contractors for the United States Government during the Iraq War, and the widow who dedicated her life to finding justice for her husband and the other victims—a riveting tale of courageous heroes, corporate war profiteers, international business, exploitation, trafficking, and human rights in the age of global capitalism that reveals how modern power truly works.
 

Lisa

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I’m reading this right now...I can’t believe what he’s gone through, no wonder he feels like the enemy of the state!

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