site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1801 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

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.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The End of Faith, Menace of the Herd and Non-Computable You. Picking up Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, which seems overdue.

I'm listening to Post Captain in the Aubrey/Maturin series. I'm continuing with the audiobooks because I'm kind of addicted to the Narrator Patrick Tull. The books were recorded back in the 90's and while there's a small loss in audio from the CD > mp3 encoding, it generally holds up. No sound effects, but still great narration.

I really enjoy having a bottomless 'go to' fictional audiobook list that I can mindlessly put on for chores, exercise, driving etc.

Edit: About the series itself so far, I'm really enjoying it. Not just for the adventurous Age of Sail naval life (and the cavalier cheapness thereof), but the incredibly subtle ways the author alludes to background events such as the strange love triangles/squares set against the mores of courting, Maturin's intelligence operations, the Irish independence movement and related conflicting loyalties. If it continues like this, I'll be a very happy 'reader' indeed.

Finished (Romance of the) Three Kingdoms, unabridged translation by Moss Roberts. It was pretty enjoyable both as a story and an insight into Chinese history and culture. The biggest difficulty is the constant bombardment of new unfamiliar names. It helps if you already have some idea who the most important players are. Also the last 15% or so is less enjoyable because the most interesting characters are dead and we're basically recapitulating the earlier stuff but grimier and less heroic. Definitely worth reading if you have any interest in the era - or you could watch the Red Cliff movie to get a (slightly modernized) taste.

Elon Musk’s biography. Honestly, the first page elicited a ton of pity from me for the poor guy. His insane behavior is quite easy to understand when you learn he was beaten by other boys in school as a pecking rank thing to the point his nose broke and his asshole father condoned all of it.

For non-fiction I'm making my way through "Bad Therapy." The gist is that it isn't just awareness, mental health really has been declining since Gen X (as measured by teenage suicides, for example) and that a lot of the treatments and interventions we do to young people are making them more unhappy not fixing things. It is causing me to rethink a lot of my own experiences and theory of mind beliefs.

I finished "How to Invent Everything" and it was a fun rundown of technology, although I'd quibble at a whole chapter on music theory (you don't need music theory to invent music!) but the exclusion of photography was the only gap that bothered me.

For fiction this week I read the Country House Murders anthology in the hopes of discovering a new author to scratch the Agatha Christie / Dorothy Sayers itch, but not really. I'm also rushing through Clytemnestra's Bind, which reminds me of the amazing Circe* and spending time in an ancient world is always great for the brain. Also some random Tom Clancy that isn't that interesting.

*Selfishly, the author of Circe, Madeline Miller, seems to spend most of her time on her day job and not enough time writing fiction.

After the discussion in here, I picked up The Mote in God's Eye. Haven't gotten very far into it yet (just to the point of the first contact), but it made me wonder if Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky was conceived as a rebuttal to this novel.

Military-inspired hardons aside, the novel has some of the worst characterization I've read in a critically-acclaimed sci-fi novel. Egan and Liu are Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky when compared to the Pournelle/Niven duo.

I finished Sandman. I see why people loved it, but it's interesting reading a commercial serial with literary pretensions, you can see the plots become more interesting and long running as Gaiman had more leash to play from his audience and publisher. I started it as a result of the all the Neil Gaiman furor, people kept saying he was a genius and I thought gee let me check it out. Reading between the lines, one very clearly sees Gaiman's sexuality spelled out in the pages.

I'm wrapping up Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer's bio of Pat Tillman, which I'd started last fall and then forgotten at my parents' house. It is a favorable biography, just short of hagiography, but I nonetheless find myself disliking Tillman. I should like him: he was an athlete, a reader, a striver. But I find myself so frustrated with Tillman! Krakauer writes off his high school assault charge, which Tillman maneuvered with his lawyer to get out of by cleverly hiding it from the colleges he was recruited by to get a scholarship offer, then present to the judge that he had a scholarship and if the judge didn't have mercy he would lose the scholarship. Krakauer never grapples with how to square this with Tillman's emphasis on honesty with regards to personal values and straightforwardness in relationships. Tillman gets credited with turning down a massive contract to change teams so he could stick with the Cardinals, who proceeded to bench him; Krakauer presents this as an unconcern with money, I see it as annoying stupidity and weakness, letting the billionaire's take advantage of you. Tillman joining the Rangers was admirable, as was his written opposition to the conduct of the wars, but I'm once again frustrated by him. His decision to join as a grunt instead of an officer mirrors, exactly, the decision made by one of my best friends to join the Marines. Tillman was, of course, killed by friendly fire, my childhood friend was permanently traumatized after being caught in a "friendly" artillery barrage for hours. Knowing my friend, I always wondered if he would have wound up so fucked up if he had gone in as an officer, because he was such a brilliant competent guy. But he wanted to, like Tillman, go in as a grunt, go in to fight, and as a result they lost everything. It's a similar dynamic to turning down money to change teams, self-victimizing out of a misguided sense of honor. I'm getting to the end of the book, which is clearly going to be a second-by-second breakdown of the day Pat died, followed by the fallout. I'm curious to see if I get anything out of it all.

It's interesting realizing that Krakauer's assumptions are a little different, in 2009, than ours are today. He wrote just after Obama's first election, when there was still a feeling that the GWOT and its accoutrements were reversible. It turned out that they weren't, or at least that no one was much interested in doing so. Obama would disappoint his anti-war supporters, and constant overseas deployments in semi-legal wars and police actions are now a fact of American life, accepted by everyone to varying degrees.

Just finished Trinity's Child, the book which the HBO made-for-tv movie Dawn's Early Light is based on. It was written probably at the peak of 80's SIOP nuclear paranoia and presents a look at the difficulties that stopping even a limited engagement would be due to the number of dead-man's switches in place. The book is a little dour, and the writing has the flavor of a journalist trying their hand at creative writing, which is what it was, and it didn't pull too many punches. It's certainly no Tom Clancy novel in that respect, though it is similar in the way that it proceeds mechanistically on a fixed timeline across several plot threads. The movie was a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book, but obviously without the internal existential crises the characters go through in the book. I couldn't acquire it either physically or electronically new and had to buy a used copy that appears to be an original hardcover printing that circulated in the Richmond public library.

It was an interesting read, and it prompted me to think a while about why global thermonuclear war seems to trigger so little existential dread now as compared to then, despite the weapons still existing in roughly the same form. I suppose it's partly because the number has definitely been reduced but also because the perception at least is that with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the level of alert is noticeably lower. The bombers are not on 24-hour alert and the Post-Attack Command and Control System is not on continuous airborne alert status. However, the pieces are all still maintained and operational, and something like SIOP still exists. I think it's an underrated existential threat these days, compared to climate change and meteor strikes.

I picked up The Universal State of America: An Archetypal Calculus of Western Civilisation by Simon Sheridan on @thejdrizzler 's recommendation, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

It definitely has me thinking of my own life from a Jungian archetype perspective and whether I've actually completely transcended the orphan stage into adulthood especially since the transitional, exoteric societal rites don't seem to exist, or have any meaning. I also just got to the section about the increase of Sage's who are disconnected from the cultural milieu and because the "magic" is gone from the societal rites it causes them to question the societal metaphysics. I can clearly see the parallel with a lot of the dissident right and woke left that gets discussed on here.

Definitely worth the pickup!

Still reading House, by Tracy Kidder, and as I expected Kidder is painting quite the picture of both the people and the process of custom building a home.

Making my way through The Way Of Kings. The prose is really mediocre, actually seems worse than his Wheel of Time entries, almost like he just doesn’t try as hard when he doesn’t have Jordan’s standard to live up to. Spren are still really annoying. Still, there’s a hint of a really interesting plot here. Dalinar and Shallan have more interesting stories than Kaladin.

Usually I read long series like this one straight through so as to not forget important details but there’s so much summary content available for Stormlight I might space it out. Will likely read a different genre next. I’m thinking either House of Leaves, Neal Stephenson’s Ananthem, or Pillars of the Earth.

I adored Anathem. Read it ages ago, though.

Personally, I bounced off of Anathem within several chapters when I first picked it up. Then, quite a few years afterwards, I was able to dive right in and plow through it, enjoying it greatly. Even now, the only difference that I can point to as a possible explanation is that I had devoured a lot more Neal Stephenson in the intervening years.

Eh, it really wasn't my cup of tea.

Like so many other of his novels, it felt very much like two or three novels roughly grafted together, and where only the first one was interesting. Not as egregious as Seveneves, but that's not saying much.

I like stormlight archives but I feel that the writing gets worse as we go along. There must be a line between character development and pop psychology, and it feels like along the way EVERY one of the main characters has to go through multiple rounds of "processing" their "trauma". To the ridiculous extent that Kaladin actually invents group trauma therapy for soldiers with PTSD! I loved book 1 Shallan but she gets worse. Loved early Dalinar, he gets worse.

Sandersons mind is an enjoyable place to hang out but honestly his wheel of time ending was stronger than his own books.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats