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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3265 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading? (There was another book thread in the Fun Thread here)

Still on Human Action. Also going through Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute, an early and very unusual warning shot against the dangers of the internet. It is a bit haphazard, but also a bit profound, and I wonder why I have never heard of this book before.

To run on automatic is, for the human being, to sink toward instinct, unfreedom, and statistical predictability. It is to give up what sets us most vitally apart from our material environment and our tools. It is to remain asleep in our highest capacities.

Whether our ideals can survive depends- beyond all pessimism and optimism vested in automatic processes- on whether we can consciously take hold of the mechanisms around us and within us, and raise them into the service of what is most fully human because most fully awake. The first prerequisite is to recognize the severity of the challenge.

Still plowing through Errol Flynn's autobiography. It's good, even gripping, I juat don't have a lot of time lately.

Since I last wrote of it he has :

  1. frolicked with a farmers"s daughter and gotten chased off the land. That was probably good though because it was a sheep farmer and Flynn's job involved "dagging the hogget." Actually he didn't dag the hogget (I'll let you look that up), he was the next guy, meaning he took the sheep and bit off its testicles. Yes you read that correctly. Makes me sentimental for the pre -title reel of that Indian video linked by Kulak. Anyway look up dagging the hogget. It's a crazy world, folks. Nuts, really, and then you must apparently bite them off.

  2. continued running with the stolen jewels he stole, only to be himself relieved of them while in an unsuspecting drunken stupor.

  3. been involved in cockfights where he and his coeval poisoned the bird's beak so it would autowin. Got caught. Had to haul ass. Yes there is a pattern here.

  4. made it with a Japanese wife of a Swedish man on a boat while at sea, who eventually catches them. Running occurs At least one shot is fired, though where .the bullet ended up is anybody's guess.

  5. been eviscerated, almost, by an angry untipped rickshaw driver. I think this was India.

  6. been to many a whorehouse. Brothel, if you prefer. He speaks highly of brothels and the women who work in them.

I am now up to the chapter where I think he is about to start acting.

Will post again next week.

Still on Human Action.

Given how much I like Austrian Economics, I figured I should actually read(listen to the audiobook of) this.

The entirety of the first 90 minutes was spent belaboring the same two or three points about human nature. Yeah, these points are foundational to the entire discipline, and some core insights are genius, but I stand my my take that SBF was right about books.

I’m kind of obsessed with those points on human nature (though I get obsessed with new ideas on a weekly basis). I’m actually less interested in the economics, though that is interesting too. What really caught my attention was an extrapolation of his “methodological dualism” (Mises’ belief that the scientific metaphor is inappropriate for the social sciences), the idea of deductive reasoning as related to classical humanism, the liberal arts, etc. It’s one of the reasons why I’m getting interested in Spinoza as well.

As for the value of books, all I can say is that nothing else in my life has made such reliable and profound personal changes in me than books. Artistic works (including stories) are always an irreplacable whirlwind of feelings, and videos are very useful for finding new directions, but some things only come out in the written word, longform, as difficult as it can be to keep going.

It's been a few weeks since I've responded to this thread as I have been abroad. But in the two weeks that I was out of the country I finished two books and am halfway through the third!

I picked up Notes From Underground based on the discussion from this thread: https://www.themotte.org/post/970/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-21/205968?context=8#context.

I really enjoyed this book. It's been a while since I've read any Dostoevsky, and I recall him being long-winded and dry. Underground, being a bit shorter than some of his other work, was much more approachable.

While reading it, I was reminded of Elliot Rodger's manifesto. If you don't know, Rodger, a school shooter and notorious "incel", wrote a "manifesto" which was widely publicized and diseccted. You can find it on the internet if you feel like searching for it, but I won't link it here. The alienation in both works is profound, the scene where Underground's protagonist meets with four "friends" for dinner and insists on displaying his own greatness is a masterclass in uncomfortable writing. It reminded me of Rodger's own massive sense of superiority and narcissism, mixed with his incredible feelings of inferiority and self-loathing. Yet instead of shooting up a school, the protagonist of Underground visits a prostitute, where he is able to feel comfortable for just a moment before reverting to his sniveling self.

What I find so interesting about both of these works is that we all have a little bit of Rodger and the protagonist in us. We all have feelings of superiority and self-doubt. That is what makes Underground so compelling. Of course, what Rodger did was despicable and the way he is praised in certain corners of the internet is sickening, but I can also empathize with his plight. Feeling so alienated and alone from the rest of humanity is a curse. People can become socially isolated for a variety of reasons; mental illness, autism, social phobia, and traumatic experiences. It's not necessarily an individual's fault for experiencing this isolation. But it's absolutely their fault in how they respond to it. Maybe Rodger should have visited a prostitute, like the protagonist of Underground. Anyway, there's a lot to mine from this book and I am much obliged to that discussion and recommendation.

The second book I finished was 1984. I last read this when I was 16 and I don't think I appreciated how good this book is. I'll write more on this book next week.

I am now midway through All the Light We Cannot See. I remember the title being vaguely familiar, but didn't realize how big this book was until I did a little research. I'm don't typically gravitate toward the "Oprah book club" type, but this book is just really fucking good. Hope it keeps up.

I'm reading Hesse's Steppenwolfe right now and it strikes me as the self-aware version of Underground quite a bit. Not finished yet, so it could change.

It's fun reading Underground at different points in your life. The extent to which I sympathized with the protagonist as I douchey college type is now pure chuckle-memory to my now Based Giga-Chad self. Ah fuck I see what I did there.

Adam Nevill’s Last Days, a novel about a guy in the 2010s filming a documentary about an apocalyptic 60s cult. Really enjoying the writing style so far, it’s entertainingly sardonic without being too cynical.

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