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Notes -
I took a pause on my War and Peace reread to read some other books. I realize the critique of the "finishing quantity of books" approach to reading, but I stick to it anyway, sometimes I just need the feeling of closure. I decided I wanted to read Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches to get more insight into War and Peace and Tolstoy's philosophy, then I saw a review of Day of the Oprichnik and thought it would be fun to dive into some modern Russian Lit, then I was traveling for Easter and wanted a light physical book to read so I grabbed my wife's copy of Trust The Plan a reporting book about the QAnon world. One of the reasons I think both E-Readers and physical print has a place in the world is because of social conventions. At a town meeting where I'm not actually working while they're handling other topics but I have to sit quietly for several hours, I can get away with reading on a tablet and no one will really question it, I can at least pretend I'm working or looking at material related to the meeting; while sitting on a tablet at the beach with my in laws is kinda less social and acceptable than sitting with a book.
All three were around 200 pages, and easy reads. Thoughts on them:
-- Sevastopol Sketches is fascinating, it really is Young Tolstoy. You can feel the immediacy of the work, Tolstoy served there. You can see how the rhythms of Sevastopol, of siege, really played into his portrayal of other military campaigns, and of military life generally. My feeling on this re-read of War and Peace has been that the core theme of the work is questioning what is real. There are all these parallel forms and spheres of life in the book going on at the same time: Russian high society, the Russian peasantry, the soldiers in combat, the General staff and their politics, the intelligentsia and the intellectual world, the Freemasons and other reformists. You can see the germ of this idea forming here, the focus is purely military, but you have the same passage of officers between the town and the batteries, between life in Russia and life at the front, and decisions being made to privilege one version of life or the other, and the work questions which is real. In many ways War and Peace takes that core conflict of Sevastopol and multiplies it in fractals, adding civilian life and intellectual life and politics and secret societies. If you wanted to read Tolstoy but didn't want to tackle 1400 pages, I'd recommend it, it's a quick easy read and the characters don't suffer from being impossible to keep track of, no character-web necessary here, just a quick tight military novella.
--Day of the Oprichnik I didn't really get. It felt a lot like reading bro-lit in 2024, like Christopher Moore whose recent work I got for christmas or Chuck Pahluniuk or (I'm gonna get in trouble here) Cormac McCarthy, with the gross-out aspect of the daisy chain orgy and the rape scenes feeling kinda unnecessary. I kinda rushed through it by the end, I was getting bored by it once I realized nothing was really going to happen. Reading the Wikipedia I guess there's strong elements of satire of other Russian works I hadn't read, and symbolism rooted in Russian literature and history I didn't get. There's an interesting aspect of "was this predicting the future of eg Prighozin?" but I didn't get a ton out of it to be honest.
--Trust The Plan was ok. I'm glad I read it, but it felt so cowardly. It reminds me of how critically I read most media compared to the average person. The book covers Q from birth to present day. I feel like the overview gave me a better understanding of the ecosystem, and the vignettes of some of the criminal shit believers have gotten up to gave me a taste of just how depraved and insane some of this shit is. I came out wondering at what point Q itself comes to court as a criminal conspiracy, what with all the fugitive harboring? But I felt like the author chickened out when it came to asking the Big Questions about conspiracy theorism. Epstein gets only a passing mention, how do you talk about conspiracy theories and not mention that? The orthodox theory of conspiracy theories I remember from a million history channel documentaries growing up was that people believed conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination because they wanted it all to mean something and not just be a coincidence. At the very least, even if you believe the official Epstein story, that theory fits right in: people want to believe in a pedophile cabal because it's actually in some ways less horrifying than a single pedophile conman who could just, you know, do that. Epstein also vastly undermined the arguments against Q: Jewish financial elites aren't abusing children on secret islands, except that one time they did, but it was a one-off. Or the rest of MeToo, while the author tries to both-sides a little on conspiracy stuff, the world was suddenly full of secret-elite rapists, and Q is in many ways just a mass-hallucinatory-expansion of MeToo. Or the War in Iraq, or the Great Recession and the Subprime Crisis, all cases where elites knew something was fake and gay and going to go horribly wrong and sold the American people a line of bullshit about it.
In other personal news, I successfully completed a side-quest new year's resolution: I went swimming in the Long Island Sound in March. Just under the wire. It was so cold at 6am that at first it felt like dying, but then I'd settle in and swim a half mile. On Saturday I was alone except for two golden retrievers and their owner, it took forever to get into the water because the dogs kept looking at me going into the water and going nuts. What the fuck are you doing you idiot, it's cold!
I'm still losing weight, surprisingly Easter at the in-laws didn't derail me. I brought a single 20kg kettlebell, and did a pentathlon Easter morning, I figured the best way to honor the season was to put some holes in my hands. Maybe I'll get back on that for another season, this time last year I really enjoyed it. Hope everyone had a happy Easter.
I'm also breaking this rule but it has been very enjoyable. Being able to listen to audiobooks at work has paradoxically increased my reading pace by a lot. Sure you can read much faster than you can listen to someone read aloud, but 6-8 hours of slow listening each day still adds up to more than however many hours I could realistically devote to sitting down and reading after work when I'm tired and have the internet to distract me.
I'm still pessimistic about the use of audiobooks for denser stuff like history and philosophy, but another hack that works here is to bring a kindle to the gym and spend 40 minutes reading on the exercise bike. You can read between sets while lifting too (24 2-3 minute rest periods is a decent chunk of time) but I'm not confident that all the stopping and starting is good for comprehension.
It just depends what you are looking to get out of it. I've listened to plenty of non-fiction history audiobooks, and it's entertaining and I learn a lot from it, but the takeaways are going to be narrower than if I really put the effort into a book on paper. I'm not going, to by any means, memorize all the facts in an audiobook. I'm less likely to remember particular facts or names, so it varies by book. Europe's Tragedy was hard to follow on tape, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was excellent.
I'm a big audiobook guy but that tends to be a different category for me, and I still try to read in print.
In my case, unless I set out to study it, this is also true for reading. My problem with audiobooks is more practical: I get distracted by something, the audiobook plays on regardless, I realise I've missed a few steps in the argument/missed some important turn of events and fumble about on my phone's touchscreen trying not to accidentally jump back 20 minutes. With reading getting distracted usually just means you stop reading for however long your attention is elsewhere.
I might take your recommendation and give it a shot, I haven't noticed myself getting distracted too often with this recent run of fiction audiobooks so maybe I've just gotten used to the format over time.
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I don’t know, to me the Q thing feels like an Alex Jones thing. Very rich and powerful men fucking teenage concubines is something that has always happened and probably always will. But by extension that suddenly means we have to believe in the deep religious / spiritual / satanic / conspiratorial explanation offered by QAnon? To me it seems very similar to the Kennedy assassination; something bad happens, there must be an explanation. It can’t just be that a very rich man used his immense wealth and extensive connections built up over decades to get away with fucking poor teenage Eastern European models and kids from broken homes in East Palm Beach, likely with tacit approval of intelligence to get kompromat on some powerful people. It must be this satanist thing, with satanic imagery scrawled alongside other questionable scrawled upon the walls of a DC pizza restaurant, with eschatological implications, with Deep Lore tied to a bizarre hybrid of new-world and old religious institutions.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theorists is this gish gallop of theories. It’s in the suggestion that one conspiracy being proven means that they’re all true, or at least plausible, when this isn’t the mechanism by which any hypothesis of this kind could or should possibly be judged. Most individual conspiracies are highly flimsy, but their credibility with their supporters is built on their resting, one billion miles down, on the faintest grain of truth.
I’ve always struggled to understand this gap between plausibility and reality among conspiracists. Yes, some super rich people get away with fucking teenagers. No, that doesn’t mean Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. It certainly doesn’t mean that the federal governments had aliens on ice under Area 51. It doesn’t even mean most Epstein conspiracies are true (“anyone who flew on the plane was involved” lmao these people don’t understand how rich people culture even works etc etc). He probably did kill himself, many people would in his situation facing guaranteed jail for the rest of his life, likely in complete isolation.
It reminds me of kitchen-sink conspiracy settings like Assassin’s Creed or Funcom’s largely forgotten ‘Secret World’ MMO. Believing in everything doesn’t look smart, it just makes you look goofy. The harsh reality of the age old ‘elites are molesting kids’ isn’t that they aren’t (some are), but that the rate of sexual deviancy is in fact much higher among the plebs than the elites. But, of course, that’s much less interesting.
Q I think started life as a troll, but a lot of it seemed just to perfectly viral and too “addictive” to followers over too long of a period of time to have been simply a random troll. It was pretty sophisticated, having a lot of ARG elements (codes based on capitalization of certain words, date and time stamps having a meaning, phrases repeated, etc.) as well as the repeated phrase of “we go all” which interestingly enough stopped around Jan 6 2020. Some of the sex stuff and the child adenochrome stuff seemed pretty calculated to paint the elites in question as uniquely evil and depraved, and something that would absolutely make any believer willing to take some sort of action to stop the elites. Child sex slavery and child torture are obviously meant to be provocative, and the kind of accusation that denials don’t exactly make go away.
As to why conspiracy is attractive, I’ve often held it to be a form of political and social Gnosticism. Part of the attraction is that it provides a kind of Political and Social theodicy— things are not bad because of incompetence, or individual greed, or bad incentives producing bad policies that make people worse off. It’s deliberate, THEY (whoever they may be) are doing it all on purpose. And this not only gives the impression that the problems are being produced to harm us little people, and those doing it know what they’re doing. It also give the believer the feeling of being in the know, and thus part of a secret group that gets it. This in itself is empowering as it gives the believer the idea that since a lot f people get it, that there’s a resistance movement (or maybe they actually form one). They seem more common when things seem bad and are getting worse. There weren’t a lot of conspiracies in good times, or if there were, they weren’t taken seriously. In 1990, it was UFOs probing people, maybe the government was reading your emails, but nothing seemed serious. In 2020, the government pushed a “clot shot” to depopulate the planet, and stole an election and want to confine people to one section of their city. The difference is that 2020 was worse for the average citizen than 1990.
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Sure, you quickly get into the Foucault's Pendulum type stuff, and I'm not going to argue for every insane theory. It isn't even necessary to argue for Epstein conspiracy theories truth value. But we're talking about the book here.
When we're studying "Why did QAnon rise right now?" which was the premise of the book, why would we not include this very suspicious and very public thing that happened, widely cited by the primary sources as proof? It seems a very odd omission. The author seems to want to place blame purely on the believers, that they are 100% responsible for choosing to buy into Q, but at that scale we have to look at it in terms of societal causes, and ask how we can prevent it. And part of that should be, hey our institutions need to regain credibility.
As I pointed out, in some ways to the human mind a pedophile cabal is less horrifying. "Lmao you don't know rich people" is a funny gag sure, but which is worse: that the current rich people are pedos and we need to throw them out, or that rich people just don't care that he was a pedo, that they're indifferent to it? An organized moral universe is a comfort, even if it is a dark one.
Worse is the ultimate horror, the one they can’t confront, which is that in every American town, in working and middle class communities across the country and the world are people who have done worse than Epstein. Bur because they’re not rich, because they’re not ‘elites’, because those who turn a blind eye to their misdeeds are commoners rather than elites, the jealousy that drives most of the outrage at those on top can’t exist, and so they’re much less interesting.
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