BF2S Forums BF3s Book Club

the vaccines are measurably, absolutely not useless are they?

reading so many books and still a dipshit.

where’s the huge wave of deaths with omicron again, remind me?

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

'why do i need to take a dumb ethics module?' - STEM graduate.

Said not STEM graduate ever.

false

So Stalin was a literature nerd and grammar nazi - makes perfect sense.

There are at least 100 bots here at any one time.

Also you should capitalise the first letter in a sentence.

Stop bullying Dilbert. You are like a NKVD agent. Are you going to try to walk him into a Polish forest at some point?

Ordered this
The Black Banners (Declassified) How Torture Derailed the War on Terror
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393540727

I think that will make book 51

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/februar … -truth-age

provoking stuff as usual from pankaj.

After 9/11, however, amid Western preparations for retribution in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, facts rather than fiction – the facts of history, politics, sociology and, especially, religion – suddenly seemed crucial to re-education in the self-involved West. In the abrupt efflorescence of Western curiosity about far-off lands and peoples, I was one of those tasked with answering the puerile question ‘why do they hate us?’

Early in 2001, a few months after publishing my first novel, The Romantics, I had travelled to Afghanistan. I wrote at length, in Granta and the New York Review of Books, about the way the country had been ravaged by the Soviet Union, the ‘free world’ and Saudi-sponsored Islamic fundamentalists. I tried to describe this recent history from the point of view of the Afghans. Soon after 9/11, however, I found myself routinely invited by the American and European media to share my expertise on ‘terrorism’.

There were, back then, very few writers of non-Western origin in the Anglo-American press, and I often accepted the absurd role of a terrorism expert out of an uneasy sense of responsibility. Writers not previously known for their acquaintance with the Quran had suddenly become loquacious with interpretations of jihad and analyses of the Shariah, and anti-Islam agitators luridly colouring in a Muslim propensity for irrationalism were anointed as brave truth-tellers. More ominously, as bombs exploded across Afghanistan and the calls grew for war in Iraq, many British and American commentators relished their newfound bloodthirstiness, typified by Christopher Hitchens urging Nato to bomb Afghanistan out of the Stone Age.

Last edited by uziq (2022-02-18 05:58:09)

Dilbert_X wrote:

So Stalin was a literature nerd and grammar nazi - makes perfect sense.

brezhnev, arguably the greatest cold war leader of consequence.

- unleashed the warsaw pact armies to crush the prague spring in '68.
- sent russians into afghanistan in '79 and considerably destabilized the world.
- devised the 'brezhnev doctrine' which authorized the use of lethal force to repress any nation threatening uprisings.

and, more inhumanely:

- oversaw, as one of the many middle-rank bureaucrats/administrators of the 'banality of evil', to borrow arendt's phrase about the workings of nazism, the liquidation of the wealthy kulak class of landowners.
- helped to administer stalin's 'reign of terror'.
- helped to oversee krushchev's disastrous 'virgin lands' policy.
- was involved in the local implementation of forced collectivisation, which led to 4 million deaths in ukraine's holodomor.
- personally oversaw the deportation of thousands of peasants from his administrative zone in the ukraine to the arctic.

and the thing with brezhnev? he assiduously cultivated the image of a 'new engineer', part of the new soviet caste of engineering masters-of-the-universe. he rose through the ranks of soviet civil society as a manager of a metal plant, first, known colloquially as the 'dnipropetrovsk mafia', and then as minister of armaments and production in the run-up to ww2. he was a stats man, a figures guru, a production panjandrum. 

the icing on the cake is that his formal education was in 'land management' and metallurgy, graduating out of engineering/technical colleges. so when you say 'humanities education doesn't benefit politicians or make them nice people', arguing that their distantly related reading in classics/philosophy barely helps; what the fuck are you going to say about an engineer educated in LAND MANAGEMENT who oversaw a mass famine and genocide-scale death? lmao.

MAKE U THINK. read a book.

Last edited by uziq (2022-02-19 08:23:00)

even the wikipedia says it is entirely conventional stuff. 19th century? newly literate public? small emerging nationalist identity? heavily romanticist/heroic/epic? check, check, check.

writing poetry in that era was the equivalent of having a tiktok account.

the reddit-tier of famous authors (orwell, huxley, vonnegut, etc) all wrote journalism or adjacent nonfiction.

book PR (and indeed shelf space in brick & mortars) is an incredibly precious commodity. always has been, but is particularly so now we live in a multi-threaded constant stream of content.

the NYT bestseller’s list is mostly an insider job. CNN staffers plugging one another’s book is an extension of this. nonfiction in the US and the determination of success/hype/discourse seems to fall down to a very small clique of pundits and commentators.

another win for capitalism.