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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2320 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 13, 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?

Still on Future Shock, Committing Journalism and Scaramouche. Sabatini never fails. Also going through Mises’ The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, which hits like a blunt instrument but offers an interesting model for understanding people.

Reading The Expert Guide to Fertility. Not because I'm looking to get pregnant or impregnate someone, but research for a project.

Finished Lethal Injection by Jim Nisbet the other night. Decent, but the comparisons to Jim Thompson probably oversold it a hair. For such a short and temporally compact book (barely 150 pages in the edition I read, with the action taking place over a few days), it felt remarkably slow at times.

Just picked up Bastiat's "The Law". It's...fine, I guess. It deserves to sit next to Communist Manifesto as an example of Romantic political pamphlets - their use of language points to their beliefs as self-evident truths. They don't wish to persuade, only to start talking points that they hope others repeat. For 1800s Europe, I guess that worked? It's still used on Twitter, Tumblr & Reddit today - so the technique seems useful enough.

But at least I finally have an idea of where "taxation is theft" came from. I wasn't fond of the idea before, and this book doesn't do it any favors.

I'm absolutely stunned by the audible production of Moby Dick I'm listening to.

A friend got me to read a book about Singapore in WWII called The Price of peace and it's fascinating how the war in Malaya was going to keep going on then all of a sudden the war ends for reasons none of them could possibly have known anything about or impacted in any way. Every account reflects that experience.

I'm absolutely stunned by the audible production of Moby Dick I'm listening to.

Which audible version is it/who's the narrator?

Related - I recently read this fascinating blog post about whaling by Matt Lakeman.

This vaguely reminded me of one of my favorite memes that went something like:

"When a Serb kills an Austrian in Bosnia so the British send you, an Indian, to Singapore to fight the Japanese."

This version is not quite right historically. Japan was on the Allied side in WW1, but didn't do much fighting.

I think it was meant to be a joke on the butterfly effect (I'm pretty weak on history but I vaguely remember lots of causal links between WWI and WWII). It could also just have been someone (and me) mixing up the World Wars.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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