What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[WarpedWartWars]

I'm listening to myself hum and sing.

[Raphael]

I'm currently working my way through Douglas Halberstam's classic The Best and the Brightest, about how some of the most celebrated graduates of some of the USA's most prestigious universities led that country into the Vietnam War.

Some of the terminology Halberstam uses hasn't aged well, to put it politely. At some points, the accounts of bureaucratic infighting within the US Government get a bit tedious for someone who, like me, isn't really into soap operas. One thing that didn't bother me, but might confuse people who aren't as good as me at following stuff like that, is how he sometimes jumps back and forth between talking about things that happened in the 1940s and talking about things that happened in the 1960s. And I'm not sure how much the book is going to tell me things that I don't already know - ironically to some extent because they became common knowledge thanks to the book's own influence and stature.

But, with those caveats, it's a pretty good book. It gets me curious: are the long-established East Coast old money families still as well-represented in the USA's ruling bureaucracy today? Or do they prefer more subtle and indirect ways of exerting their influence these days?

[Man in Space]

Aineth – “Memories of the Lost”

[Raphael]

Read this very brief post on Mastodon a few hours ago, by someone named Mark McCaughrean who works for the European Space Agency, and just had to mention it here for containing one of my favorite quotes of this year:

https://mastodon.social/@markmccaughrea ... 6810400317

“Space may be a vacuum, but it doesn’t take place in one.”

[alice]

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. Effectively the footnotes to the putative annotated edition. Fascinating!

[foxcatdog]

Yesterday i watched It comes at night. It's interesting because without the ending its a thoroughly mediocre film yet i feel like the ending elevates it to great cinema.

[rotting bones]

Fourier transform: https://youtu.be/r18Gi8lSkfM
Trump > Jesus: https://youtu.be/znUsUwplw0g
Liberal Redneck on Hollywood Strikes: https://youtu.be/EOEb_ws1vCk
Time Dilation in Relativity: https://youtu.be/eKkH4IH-zmw
Richie Hawtin's techno is good for debugging: https://youtu.be/fDBcxEMHNMs

I have read so many books since last time, they have blurred together in my head. E.g. I have finished reading the complete works of Aristotle.

[Raphael]

This, by Naomi Klein, about Naomi Wolf, might be interesting, though I haven't read most of it yet:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/ ... y-theories

[WarpedWartWars]

For books and movies: Game of Thrones, which I'm currently waiting until I can go to the library to get season 3 of; Wolves of the Beyond, same but book 2; and Dave the Villager, which I have the next book of (book 38), but I haven't started reading it quite yet.

For music, a bunch, but especially Jormungandr by Peyton Parrish.

[Raphael]

I just started Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild (no relation).

[alice]

Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations.

[Raphael]

I just started Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild (no relation).

Now I've learned from a brief aside in the book (about other rich families who probably have more money than the Rothschilds these days) that the company selling Mars bars is owned by a family that's actually named "Mars":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_family

I would never have guessed that. Why didn't I already know it? And why isn't that fact generally more talked about? Shouldn't half the Internet, by now, believe in a conspiracy theory according to which that family is really from the planet Mars?

[Raphael]

I just started Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild (no relation).

Finished it. Interesting. A lot of stuff I already knew, but also some I didn't. Sometimes a bit too complimentary towards the actual Rothschild family for my taste, but that doesn't bother me much, because they themselves aren't really the main focus.

I found two small mistakes: when talking about the European part of the Great Depression, the author claims that one of the problems in the last years of the Weimar Republic was hyperinflation. Now, of course the Weimar Republic did infamously have massive hyperinflation, but that was during its early years, not during its last ones. Also, when discussing 1990s internet conspiracy theories, the author treats Usenet as a part of the World Wide Web, when, in fact, it was a different kind of Internet functionality, and older.

One neat little irony I learned about from the book is that during the USA's silver coinage arguments of the late 19th and early 20th century, the supporters of unlimited silver coinage often accused the supporters of the Gold Standard of being some kind of big evil conspiracy. Today, of course, the supporters of returning to the Gold Standard often accuse the supporters of the current money supply mechanisms of being some kind of big evil conspiracy.

The book also very indirectly and probably unintentionally provides yet another explanation for why socialism and communism never got that far in the USA: apparently, in that country, many of the people who hate rich people the most are also conspiracy theorists who believe that the rich and the communists are secretly on the same side. So they're unlikely to express their hate for the rich by supporting communists or socialists.

One thing that struck me as a bit odd is a quote about Alex Jones: "Jones put a good-looking, well-spoken, deeply passionate face on a genre that was heretofore dominated by elderly cranks and street-corner shouters pushing shopping carts."

OK, I'm a straight man myself, so I'm not really that good at judging men's looks, but with that caveat, I'm not sure on what planet Alex Jones is supposed to be "good-looking".

[Ares Land]

The book also very indirectly and probably unintentionally provides yet another explanation for why socialism and communism never got that far in the USA: apparently, in that country, many of the people who hate rich people the most are also conspiracy theorists who believe that the rich and the communists are secretly on the same side. So they're unlikely to express their hate for the rich by supporting communists or socialists.

That's an interesting point. This reminds me a bit of Philip K. Dick who was both deathly afraid of communists and Richard Nixon (and in a neat little twist of irony, strongly suspected of being a communist himself for his liberal politics.)
We're seeing some of this now in Europe I think. I know a lot of people who generally hate the rich but associate the left-wing to the vast wealthy folks/"globalists" conspiracy.

I'm reading Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé's Une histoire du conflit politique
which touches on some related issues. Cagé and Piketty basically compiled all voting statistics for French communes since 1789. (In France, a commune is the smallest political unit. They're often pretty small, population and area-wise -- way smaller than, say, a US county, so you get some really fine-grained data.)
One of their conclusion is that it makes to sense to add a geographical dimension to the usual class pattern. You can analyse voting patterns along two dimensions: wealth (a rich/poor axis), and geography (it basically amounts to urban/rural). It turns out you can pretty much predict a given voter's politics using just this information.
Generally, the rich vote for the right, and the left vote for the left. No surprises here; but if you add the geographical dimensions one of the things you notice is that the rural poor are consistently right-wing. Piketty and Cagé offer one explanation: for most of that time period, the French left-wing parties were orthodox Marxists and didn't have much to offer to, or much interest into struggling farmers. The traditional explanation in French politics was that the rural poor were entirely braiwashed by the Church; but the data doesn't support that explanation.

One pattern they notice is that party politics are generally conducive to forming either two (Left / Right, socialists/gaullists, liberals/conservatives) or three blocks (Left / Center / Right, socialist/liberal/nationalists, socialists/republicans/monarchists, Mélenchon/Macron/Le Pen, Ženië/Navirora/Caďin :p).
French politics tends to cycle between these two configurations (we had a three-block system until the 50-60s, then two blocks, and now we have three blocks again).

They feel that the two-block system is more conducive to progress and social change -- that's pretty straightforwards; in a three-block system the centrists can play off both their rivals against each other to get in government, not doing much once there. They have some hope our current configuration may still change.

Though this one is co-authored with his wife, it has all the hallmarks of a Piketty book: it's huge, complex, full of data, and takes 1000 pages to get to the point. I'm not quite there yet, so it's still not terribly clear to me what Piketty and Cagé are getting at

An English translation is due sometime soon. I don't know if it will be that relatable to international readers -- I don't know if Americans are really into the subtleties of XIXth-XXth French politics

[zompist]

The book also very indirectly and probably unintentionally provides yet another explanation for why socialism and communism never got that far in the USA: apparently, in that country, many of the people who hate rich people the most are also conspiracy theorists who believe that the rich and the communists are secretly on the same side. So they're unlikely to express their hate for the rich by supporting communists or socialists.

I'm not sure who this is referring to. It could mean the populist right, which is terrified of "socialism" and has convinced itself that they're against "the elite". But this is a sort of charade-- by "elite" they don't really mean "the rich", and they always actually like and favor the rich.

But whoever they have in mind, as an explanation of why socialism didn't take off, it's kind of circular. Socialism wasn't popular because socialism wasn't popular?

[bradrn]

One pattern they notice is that party politics are generally conducive to forming either two (Left / Right, socialists/gaullists, liberals/conservatives) or three blocks (Left / Center / Right, socialist/liberal/nationalists, socialists/republicans/monarchists, Mélenchon/Macron/Le Pen, Ženië/Navirora/Caďin :p).

I started to wonder what part of French politics a party called Ženië could possibly be related to, before realising…

Otherwise, this is a very interesting and common-sensical view. I’m not sure whether we have a two- or three-block system over here in Australia… we have two main blocks, namely Labor and Coalition, but the Greens are also very important despite being much smaller. (The Coalition in turn is composed of two parties with somewhat different backgrounds, muddying the waters further.)

[Raphael]

I'm not sure who this is referring to. It could mean the populist right, which is terrified of "socialism" and has convinced itself that they're against "the elite". But this is a sort of charade-- by "elite" they don't really mean "the rich", and they always actually like and favor the rich.

But whoever they have in mind, as an explanation of why socialism didn't take off, it's kind of circular. Socialism wasn't popular because socialism wasn't popular?

To avoid misunderstandings, it's not a point the author is making, it's kind of something I concluded myself from some of the things the author is saying. He keeps bringing up conspiracy theorists who claim that the Rothschilds, or the Rockefellers, or both, were secretly behind the Bolshevik Revolution, and then worked with international communism to create a tyrannical one-world government.

[Raphael]

Finished Going Infinite, Michael Lewis's new book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Well-written, interesting and exciting read - I bought it yesterday (when it was published) and finished it today, and I'm usually pretty bad at finishing books.

That said, it's a lot less negative about the guy than I expected it to be. And on balance, I kind of think it should have been more negative. I can't help feeling that Lewis might have fallen for an act put on by Bankman-Fried. There is some space dedicated to other people's negative impressions of him, but Lewis himself kind of seems to think that Bankman-Fried simply tried to manage something big without having any skills for managing something big, and therefore inevitably messed it all up. I think it's at least as likely that Bankman-Fried knew exactly what he was doing.

Since the book is a biography of a very weird and geeky guy, I couldn't help listing similarities and differences between myself and the main subject. There are rather more similarities than I'd like to see. Poor people skills, socially awkward, academically better than most kids back in school, standoffish, few friends? Yes. Has almost never worn formal clothes? Yes. In English-speaking parts of the internet, I'm even quite fond of the word "yup". Then again, I've never had any problem reading people's facial expressions, I do care about other people's feelings (even if, in the past, I haven't always been good at understanding them), and I'm very bad at doing two, let alone three, different things at the same time. So I would never try to hold a serious conversation with someone while playing computer games. Not that I'm all that good at computer games, anyway. Or any kind of games, really. Or higher math, for that matter.

On a different note, I wonder if Lewis might have seriously hurt his reputation by writing the book. He's written a number of bestsellers, and most of them were probably mostly bought by people with more-or-less left-of-center political views. Now he's written a book that an uncharitable reviewer might interpret as an apologia for or even a whitewash of a man whom much of the Left sees as one of the worst white-collar criminals of our time, and a symbol of all that's wrong with late-stage capitalism. Since I quite like Lewis, I don't like the idea of him ruining his standing with his core audience.

Oddly enough, the book, at one point, spends some time explaining the basics of Magic: The Gathering, but never explains much about the basics of blockchains.

Some nice quotes from the book: About a specific lawyer, Lewis writes: "He was FTX's general counsel. He was also a babysitter. To a baby who terrifies his parents and is calling the shots."

About Bankman-Fried's approach to managing a business: "He'd need to hire some lower-IQ people to do the boring stuff, like finding office space and getting food for the traders and paying utility bills and probably lots of other things he hadn't thought of."

About some of Bankman-Fried's and his staffers' last-ditch attempts to prevent bankruptcy: "As it turned out, it wasn't easy to get people to give you $7 billion when you couldn't explain why you needed it."

[rotting bones]

Rereading:

Hitherby Dragons
Neverness
Night Circus

New reads:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Caraval

PS.

Richie Hawtin's techno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKKsLLvMdlY

Recently, I've been trying to get into the abstract games Dvonn and Shobu: https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=dvonn https://www.sovranti.com/game/Shobu-Online

PPS.

More Richie Hawtin's techno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlsScIadPVo

[MacAnDàil]

Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations.

That seems interesting.

I am currently reading (among others):
La logique de la découverte scientifique by Karl Raimund Popper
The Smoky Smirr o Rain, an anthology of Scots literature
Les plantes natives de La Réunion by other members of a recently founded society, Sur les traces de Thérésien Cadet, dedicated to indigenous plants of Réunion and the local researcher who discovered many of them.

listening to (among others):
Ben Webster, jazz saxophonist
Maxime Laope, a séga singer from Réunion
Bagpipes of Scotland