What are you reading now - and then

Very interesting post and links.
Your mention of "Leaves of Grass "reminds me of a time in my teenage years when I carried that book with me wherever I went , like a Christian Evangelical carries his bible ( no offence to Christian Evangelicals).Along with Alan Watt's , "The Way of Zen" and Bertrand Russel's ,"Why I Am Not a Christian" , LOL adolescent rebellion of a former Catholic alter boy.
Also , although I'm familiar with Hubert Selby Jr. , I can't remember ever reading "Last Exit to Brooklyn" , need to give that a look. I read pretty much all of Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs ( some of that stuff is virtually unreadable ) and other Grove Press authors but "Last Exit " looks like a good read . Selby's "The Room " also looks interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Selby_Jr.
All of Orwell , Including," Down and Out in London and Paris" is in a class by itself. I loved "Burmese Days".

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Originally Posted by josehip

This is a good thread. So I will post this here.
I need some tips about Some really good Queer/non-binary authors to read (but not books). Like blogs, sites or medium. Transwomen, cis women, WOC or whatever.
Any help?

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Hey , josehip , welcome to the thread . Are you looking for erotica or something more along the lines of social commentary or journalism ?
You are certainly on the right Forum as far as sites and blogs go . With regard to authors to read , "but not books" I would suggest posing the same question to Google and see what it comes up with.

Currently I’m doing a little light reading: Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre’. Although it’s set in the current day, the story harkens back to an operation that took place during the ‘Cold War.’ The good guys aren’t so good and neither are the bad guys. I’m not a Le Carre’ reader: the only other book of his I ever read was The Delicate Truth.

I've just finished reading the 6 available novels in the Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovich. The main theme of these books is magic and weird stuff in the criminal world being dealt with by a sceptical police force. They're a really good read. There are also 3 complete graphic novels available as well.

I am now reading Sahara by Clive Cussler which is set in Mali in Western Africa.

"The Late Show" by Michael Connelly

Attachment 1032490

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Originally Posted by trish

Currently I’m doing a little light reading: Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre’. Although it’s set in the current day, the story harkens back to an operation that took place during the ‘Cold War.’ The good guys aren’t so good and neither are the bad guys. I’m not a Le Carre’ reader: the only other book of his I ever read was The Delicate Truth.

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I hope you enjoy that , I like his more recent work and non fiction much more than the earlier George Smiley spy novels and I am looking forward to reading "Legacy...",his latest.
His real life is almost more interesting than his novels , "The Pigeon Tunnel : Stories From My Life" 2016 was fascinating . His father Ronnie Cornwell was an amazing character and con man.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-li...b_9643316.html

Some of you may have read the brief exchange I had with RedVex on Solidarity in the thread on the Las Vegas massacre. I did not respond to one post because I felt the thread had lost its way and did not want to push it further away from the event in Las Vegas. It does, however, raise interesting questions about Solidarity (to give it its English name) and the transition in Poland, not least because RedVex has a radically different view from most, and one that I think is both mistaken and confusing.

The sources I have used for my initial comments are worth reading in their own right, and are Archie Brown: The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009), and Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). Both historians attribute the collapse of communism to a combination of factors, with the economic incompetence of central planning at its core, combined with Gorbachev's internal reforms and foreign policy (Afghanistan being a disater for the Soviet military). Nevertheless, this does not lessen the importance, in Poland of the Solidarity movement and the role it played in breaking the back of the Polish United Workers Party and seeing it off in the elections of September 1988.

This is what RedVex wrote (I have edited out irrelevant passages):
1. You wrote "Solidarity" rather than solidarity, so no, you were indeed referring to the party rather than solidarity or empathy.
2. Originally, Solidarity, was called PPS (Partia Pracownicza Solidarnosc) and itwas indeed a communist labour party of comrades. There isn't much resources in about that one so that people don't have many opportunities to know it even existed. The Solidarity that was formed in 1980, NSZZ Solidarnosc (Niezalezny Samorzadowy Zwiazek Zawodowy Solidarnosc), after PPS had been dissolved, was merely a medium for transferring power from the state to someone the state could easily control, e.g. by blackmail, so to agents of the Secret Police, SB (Sluzby Bezpieczenstwa), and petty snitches like Lech Walesa. Such operation was necessary as people had enough of "the system" and would not trust anyone related to it (such as gen. Jaruzelski). They would however trust an simple electrician from the shipyard.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski's decision about overthrowing the communist regime by introducing martial law was a partially successful attempt to liberate Poland. Otherwise, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which consisted of gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak's agents, would have taken over. Unfortunately no reforms took place under Jaruzelski's reign until 1988.

-I concede I had not heard of the PPS and cannot find much on the internet in either Polish or English, and it could either be the early attempts at an independent trade union that flourished briefly in 1978-79, or the first grouping in the Lenin Shipyard in 1980 prior to the formal creation of Solidarity that year.
-What I find odd is the designation of Solidarity as merely a medium for transferring power from the state to someone the state could easily control, when the reality is that what Solidarity exposed was the weakness of the Polish United Workers Party and the fact that it was not controlled by the party at all. It is just as odd to claim that Jaruzelski's decision about overthrowing the communist regime by introducing martial law was a partially successful attempt to liberate Poland when he successfully rounded up and imprisoned those leaders whom we were earlier told were stooges of the government, and delayed the transition in Poland rather than hastening it.

-A signal problem that I find with the language of RedVex's interpretation is the inability to distinguish between Communists and whoever else lives in Poland. The point may relate to the 'problem' for her, that as with Gorbachev in Russia, many if not most of Solidarity's members wanted to reform the system rather than to replace it. If many were themselves members of the PUWP but defected to Solidarity or worked for the state, then in a sense they were 'communists' by employment and affiliation. But what RedVex does not mention, is that most of Solidarity's members, whatever they job or party affiliation before 1980, would have claimed to be Roman Catholics. Indeed, a passionate fidelity to Catholicism was one of the key components of the transition in Poland which undermines the attempt to smear Solidarity as, in effect, just a tool of the Communists. The role played in all this by the Polish Pope hardly needs a reference.

-Where it becomes intriguing is in the relationship the church had with the State, from the (Stalinist) attempt to crush the church after the war, to the accommodation that was eventually reached in 1956 which became crucial in creating a space between the Party and the People in which Poles were free to express their faith, to the extent that one can see how this space (also found in a vibrant arts scene, notably in film and theatre) became vital for the anti-party protests in the 1970s and 1980s -mostly caused by price rises for basic commodities- which led in time to the eclipse of the party itself, while the Roman Catholic Church went from strength to strength. There is a brief overview of this here-
https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/exhibits/r...h/introduction

-In other words, I am confused, because a Communist cannot also be a Catholic, so why has RedVex dismissed the Solidarity movement as a Communist outfit when if anything, it could be re-designated a Catholic one? And all this without discussing the conspiracy theorists who see a conduit of CIA money via the Catholic Church to Solidarity members and other dissidents as also playing a role in the 1980s.

Right now I'm reading The 16th Round by Rubin Carter and The Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson

16th round is The book/story the holllywokd Denzel Washington movie was based on.

Really good book. Interesting and I've blasted through heaps of pages without feeling like I've been doing so. The pages have passed by easily.
Im not the biggest reader so when I get engaged in a book and don't realise how much I'm passing through it's always a good Sign.

I'm only a couple chapters into Mikes book but enjoying it so far. Will probably put it down until I finish 16th first as I don't want to split my thoughts between 2 books at once.


As for what books I like reading. For me it's exclusively autobiographys with the ocasional biography written by someone else (as I did with Unforgiveable Blackness the biography written about the first black heavyweight boxing champ). I have no interest in reading some made up story.

Welcome to the Forum and this thread ,Lk123456779.
I have noticed that as I get older I have less interest in reading fiction , no matter how well written I know it is.
Also enjoy autobiography , and it is so satisfying to find an author who has both an interesting story to tell and the ability to tell it well .

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Some of you may have read the brief exchange I had with RedVex on Solidarity in the thread on the Las Vegas massacre. I did not respond to one post because I felt the thread had lost its way and did not want to push it further away from the event in Las Vegas. It does, however, raise interesting questions about Solidarity (to give it its English name) and the transition in Poland, not least because RedVex has a radically different view from most, and one that I think is both mistaken and confusing.

The sources I have used for my initial comments are worth reading in their own right, and are Archie Brown: The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009), and Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). Both historians attribute the collapse of communism to a combination of factors, with the economic incompetence of central planning at its core, combined with Gorbachev's internal reforms and foreign policy (Afghanistan being a disater for the Soviet military). Nevertheless, this does not lessen the importance, in Poland of the Solidarity movement and the role it played in breaking the back of the Polish United Workers Party and seeing it off in the elections of September 1988.

This is what RedVex wrote (I have edited out irrelevant passages):
1. You wrote "Solidarity" rather than solidarity, so no, you were indeed referring to the party rather than solidarity or empathy.
2. Originally, Solidarity, was called PPS (Partia Pracownicza Solidarnosc) and itwas indeed a communist labour party of comrades. There isn't much resources in about that one so that people don't have many opportunities to know it even existed. The Solidarity that was formed in 1980, NSZZ Solidarnosc (Niezalezny Samorzadowy Zwiazek Zawodowy Solidarnosc), after PPS had been dissolved, was merely a medium for transferring power from the state to someone the state could easily control, e.g. by blackmail, so to agents of the Secret Police, SB (Sluzby Bezpieczenstwa), and petty snitches like Lech Walesa. Such operation was necessary as people had enough of "the system" and would not trust anyone related to it (such as gen. Jaruzelski). They would however trust an simple electrician from the shipyard.
General Wojciech Jaruzelski's decision about overthrowing the communist regime by introducing martial law was a partially successful attempt to liberate Poland. Otherwise, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which consisted of gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak's agents, would have taken over. Unfortunately no reforms took place under Jaruzelski's reign until 1988.

-I concede I had not heard of the PPS and cannot find much on the internet in either Polish or English, and it could either be the early attempts at an independent trade union that flourished briefly in 1978-79, or the first grouping in the Lenin Shipyard in 1980 prior to the formal creation of Solidarity that year.
-What I find odd is the designation of Solidarity as merely a medium for transferring power from the state to someone the state could easily control, when the reality is that what Solidarity exposed was the weakness of the Polish United Workers Party and the fact that it was not controlled by the party at all. It is just as odd to claim that Jaruzelski's decision about overthrowing the communist regime by introducing martial law was a partially successful attempt to liberate Poland when he successfully rounded up and imprisoned those leaders whom we were earlier told were stooges of the government, and delayed the transition in Poland rather than hastening it.

-A signal problem that I find with the language of RedVex's interpretation is the inability to distinguish between Communists and whoever else lives in Poland. The point may relate to the 'problem' for her, that as with Gorbachev in Russia, many if not most of Solidarity's members wanted to reform the system rather than to replace it. If many were themselves members of the PUWP but defected to Solidarity or worked for the state, then in a sense they were 'communists' by employment and affiliation. But what RedVex does not mention, is that most of Solidarity's members, whatever they job or party affiliation before 1980, would have claimed to be Roman Catholics. Indeed, a passionate fidelity to Catholicism was one of the key components of the transition in Poland which undermines the attempt to smear Solidarity as, in effect, just a tool of the Communists. The role played in all this by the Polish Pope hardly needs a reference.

-Where it becomes intriguing is in the relationship the church had with the State, from the (Stalinist) attempt to crush the church after the war, to the accommodation that was eventually reached in 1956 which became crucial in creating a space between the Party and the People in which Poles were free to express their faith, to the extent that one can see how this space (also found in a vibrant arts scene, notably in film and theatre) became vital for the anti-party protests in the 1970s and 1980s -mostly caused by price rises for basic commodities- which led in time to the eclipse of the party itself, while the Roman Catholic Church went from strength to strength. There is a brief overview of this here-
https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/exhibits/r...h/introduction

-In other words, I am confused, because a Communist cannot also be a Catholic, so why has RedVex dismissed the Solidarity movement as a Communist outfit when if anything, it could be re-designated a Catholic one? And all this without discussing the conspiracy theorists who see a conduit of CIA money via the Catholic Church to Solidarity members and other dissidents as also playing a role in the 1980s.

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Very interesting overview of Solidarity and the history of post war Europe and Communism , Stavros , thanks.

"Paradise Valley" by CJ Box

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Originally Posted by sukumvit boy

Very interesting overview of Solidarity and the history of post war Europe and Communism , Stavros , thanks.

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If you are aware of the critical view of my version by RedVex, you may also be aware that there are ferocious debates taking place on Polish history both within Poland and without. In fact I would go as far as to say that in recent years the rage and bitterness that has taken place resembles the Historikerstreit that convulsed Germany in the 1980s where the key issue was the 'correct' location of the Holocaust in German history, and whether or not it and the Third Reich was unique or a 'logical' development of the processes of modernization that followed the industrial revolution, or some aberration which has dislodged the practice of history by making it so exceptional much of what is written about the Third Reich attains the status of myth rather than verifiable history, and in doing so has created such a 'national guilt' that Germans were unable to appreciate and celebrate the fact they are German. The wikipedia article is here, followed by a more difficult interview with Nolte.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p15_warren.html

Just as the primary architect of this view, Ernst Nolte was attacked for being a 'revisionist' who in effect downgraded the importance of the Holocaust (but he did not deny it), so a ferocious debate has followed the publications in English of the historian Norman Davies. Davies, a protege of AJP Taylor, made his name with a study of Polish history, God's Playground (1979, updated in subsequent editions) and his since published a vast 1,000 pages plus book Europe: A History (1996), Europe at War, 1939-1945: No Simple Victory (2006) and Vanished Kingdoms (2010).

Davies sued Stanford on the grounds of discrimination when the university rejected his application for tenure (this took place between 1984-88), the heart of the dispute then and since being a plea by Davies (whose wife is Polish) to re-assess the history of Poland in a Polish context in which the suffering of the Poles in the period between 1939-45 is worthy of comparison to the Holocaust, thus again appearing to 'relativize' two strands of history and to some downgrading the Holocaust. Davies was attacked by the eminent historian of the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz, and others weighed in to attack what they claim is Davies' sloppy scholarship, factual errors in terms of dates and events, the falsification of history and in particular his treatment of Polish history and its most difficult period in the modern age. A flavour of these attacks can be gained from the articles below:
https://newrepublic.com/article/1021...-nation-states
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n04/neal-a...-the-cannibals
http://www.countercurrents.org/riggins271107.htm

What is intriguing for an outsider is how, at the heart of these arguments, a different perspective emerges on the fate of European Jewry than one used to get in standard studies of the period from the end of the war in 1918 to the 1945. Far from being passive Jews led like sheep to the slaughter, believing what they were told about re-location, disbelieving news of the death camps as impossible, the Jews in Poland offer a narrative of robust defenders of their communities but also communities divided amongst themselves.

Poland had at the time the largest and most diverse number of Jews in Europe - Orthodox, Liberal, Assimilated- and had established themselves in a variety of professions across the country. In addition to the anti-semitism embedded in Polish society, what convulsed the Jews of Poland were the arguments over the merits of Zionism, whether it was a Nationalist cause or a Socialist cause, with the influence of the Russians and the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution stirring the pot even further. This robust approach to politics led to allegations that even before the German invasion Polish Jews were organized into gangs that attacked Poles, or used violence to defend Jewish communities against anti-Jewish attacks by Poles, with the Warsaw Uprising being the most celebrated if ultimate example of this trend. In this mix, you find Vladimir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin of the Betar movement, two men who eventually left Poland for Palestine where they carried on fighting, this time the British -as well as other Palestinian Jews.

The core problems revolved around Polish anti-semitism and Jewish resistance, and whether or not left-wing Jews welcomed the Red Army into Poland and thus demonstrated a lack of loyalty to Poland. A good example of the bitterness generated by Norman Davies in relation to his treatment of the Jews in Poland before the Holocaust can be found in this exchange with Abraham Brumberg, though I doubt it settles the matter.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1987...s-an-exchange/

Given the scale of the destruction of Poland's Jews, 90% of them setting aside those who managed to escape, the sorry tale is alleged to have continued after the war when, in 1946 Poles murdered 42 survivors of the Holocaust in Kielce.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...orldwar.poland

The ferocity of the arguments continues to rage in Poland with the latest target the Museum of the Second World War, which Davies (on the Museum Board) and others have said is a project being hi-jacked by the government for its own purposes:
A spectacular new museum of the second world war is at the centre of an extraordinary row between international academics and Poland’s political leadership, amid claims that the country’s ruling Law and Justice party is putting history at the service of politics.

And, to bring it back to Solidarity you get a sense of the distress with Davies attacking the leader of the Law and Justice Party:
“He is behaving like a Bolshevik and a paranoid troublemaker. Law and Justice are the most vindictive gang in Europe. Gdańsk is a particular target because of the association with Wałęsa and Solidarity, and Tusk, who is Gdańsk-born, is a history graduate and laid the foundation stone of the museum. Kaczyński was in Solidarity and managed Wałęsa’s election campaign before he became president of Poland [in 1990]. Wałęsa sidelined him, and Kaczyński has been planning his revenge ever since.’’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-says-academic

What strikes me about a lot of this history, is that I do not understand how anyone can not recognize the Holocaust as a unique event, it would be like ignoring the presence of a turd in a glass of water. The roots of its anti-semitism are undeniable, but the organization, the management, the operations that led to mass slaughter (labour camps, medical experiments, forced marches, starvation, untreated disease) -documented in print, photography and film- are of an order so unusual that it cannot just be slotted in to the history of the 20th century along with everything else. This does not mean the suffering inflicted by totalitarian regimes should be sidelined, it just calls for a nuanced treatment without losing the overall context.

But also because it is part of that whole debate about politics and society, the conflct between the Nazis and the Fascists and the Communists which some now want to collapse into one narrative in which there is no difference between them because they represented an extreme example of the State replacing the citizen, with the chilling rider that some do not feel the 'liberal democratic' states that survived are these days that much better than the regimes they have marshalled off the world stage.

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Originally Posted by trish

Currently I’m doing a little light reading: Legacy of Spies by John Le Carre’. Although it’s set in the current day, the story harkens back to an operation that took place during the ‘Cold War.’ The good guys aren’t so good and neither are the bad guys. I’m not a Le Carre’ reader: the only other book of his I ever read was The Delicate Truth.

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I just finished Legacy. It's a bit of a throwback to the epistolary novels of the 18th century, incorporating archival memos to supply backstory, but does a great job of tying up loose ends from its predecessors, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the Karla Trilogy (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Honorable Schoolboy and Small Town in Germany). If you binge watch rather than read TSWCIFTC was an early Richard Burton movie classic, and the others were televised on BBC/PBS starring Alec Guinness as Smiley. I thought Legacy was a great read on its own but it helped to have read and watched the predecessors, even if that was decades back. Writing must keep Le Carre's mind sharp. He hasn't lost a bit in 60 years of writing.

I just started the first book of the "Saga of Recluse" series. Its called The Magic of Recluse and follows Lerris, a young, innately powerful Order Mage who has to leave his home and find out exactly what he needs to do with his life...or else.

dan brown's origin. not so art based puzzley as his previous books - but interesting romp.

Steven Livitsky & Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. What History Reveals About Our Future (Penguin Random House twenty eighteen).

This is an easy to read primer on the threats to US democracy that the authors believe has entered a dangerous new phase following the 2016 Election Campaign and the election of a man the authors claim has the potential to be a demagogue. They do not hide their concern for the 45th President but in the chapter on his first year, while highlighting the themes of the book concede that in reality he has not yet gone as far as he can and has threatened, but that it is just the first year.

The strength of the book is its theoretical premise, derived from the classic 1978 study by Juan Linz The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. The authors use his template of decline and fall, noting that democracy as an open system contains within it the opportunity for political leaders to destroy it from within, but that this often happens because a lenient class of people who could prevent it, enable the ambitious politician -often a maverick figure not connected to existing political elites- to enter high office and then subvert the democratic system -often triggered by a crisis, be it economic, a security or war scenario-, creating in effect a one-party state or dictatorship that causes even more damage than it is claimed the democracy had which preceded it. They cite examples from Fascist Italy, Germany under the Third Reich, Peru under Alberto Fujimori and Venezuela under Huge Chavez, the last being a notably chilling example given that Venezuela was and should still be a petroleum rich democracy. Key indicators that the authors use are
1) a rejection of the rules of the game that has maintained the political system the leader is opposed to and blames for decay;
2) denies the legitimacy of opponents in the democratic system;
3) tolerates or encourages violence;
4) expresses a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, often the media.

Of particular interest is the way in which they trace the breakdown of the bi-partisan consensus in Congress as a precursor to the election of 2016, and argue that the 1867 Reconstruction Act that enfranchised Black voters led to such huge victories for the Republican Party in the South that throughout the period from the 1870s to 1912 southern States a white elite that felt it had lost control of its own states, then enacted numerous laws to disenfranchise Black voters to the extent that Black voter turn out went from 61% in 1880 to barely 2% in 1912 to the benefit of the Democrat Party. Thus the stability of the US political system between the 1880s and 1965 was based on a compromise whereby the Northern 'victors' of the Civil War, in effect stood by while the southern 'losers' re-shaped their states to deny Black Americans the equal rights that they had been granted as a result of that war and the end of slavery. Moreover, it was the civil rights reforms of the 1960s that not only restored these rights, but in doing so broke the consensus, transformed a south of 'Dixiecrats' into almost solid Republican territory but brought with a fierce intensity that became expressed in the kind of aggressive language that demonizes fellow Americas as no longer partners in democracy, but opponents in a war. And over the succeeding years, the Democrats became a party of diverse Americans while the Republican Party became a party of White Evangelical Christians and political conservatives.

One such prescursor who denied the legitimacy of the opponent, was provided by the young Newton Gingrich when he ran for Congress in 1978 using language that was aggressive, arguing he was in a 'war' for power that could not be fought with 'boy scout words'. By the 1990s he was recommending that in their campaign literature and statements Republicans should describe Democrats with words such as 'pathetic, sick, bizarre, betray, antiflag, antifamly and traitors' (p148).

Thus the authors argue that the US was in 2016 and remains today vulnerable because the 'gatekeepers' who could have prevented the candidate with the least practical experience of public office from becoming President thought they could nevertheless control him; that they bear a responsibility for his outrageous behaviour and lies, and, ominously while they concede the worst excesses have been curtailed by Congress wonder how long that can hold. The attacks on the media and state institutions, the vulgar and aggressive language used by the President, his refusal to adhere to norms on the hiring of staff and the blurring of lines between his business interests and his responsibility as President present the US with potentially its most severe crisis since the Civil War.

A bracing read, and one that is recommended, even to those who think that the President is legitimate because he was elected to break the stranglehold of two now rigidly opposed parties even if, in destroying a two party system it is not clear what will replace it.

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise And Fall Of Adam And Eve. Greenblatt is interested in the evolution of the story, its elaborations and interpretations in art and literature through time as well as its impact on our understanding of morality and the relation between men and women (or their impact on tellings of the story). Interesting read. Takes you through Babylon, introduces you to St. Augustine, the Renaissance, Milton, Mark Twain and Darwin. One of Greenblatt’s thesis is that from Augustine, through the Renaissance painters and sculptors to Milton, Adam and Eve became more and more real, moving beyond the two-dimensional cutouts they were in Moses’ telling of the garden story. But by becoming real, they became mortal. The cracks and flaws in the story became obvious to those who thought about it and the myth was opened up to the ridicule of humorists (like Bayle and Twain) as well as to criticism from science. It’s a nice way to think of it, but I’m not sure it explains why it’s still taken literally by so many people on my side of the Atlantic.

Hey stavros , I see that your reading list parallels mine with regard to concern about the the future of our economic /political systems since we both read Joseph Stieglitz's " The Cost of Inequality".
My thoughts revolve around issues such as : Is the Trump election a symptom of the deep dissatisfaction with a political and economic system where real wages for the average citizen have not increased since the 1970's , while 1% of the populace controls 99% of the wealth and in America , any third ( or more )political party is doomed to failure in our" winner takes all" political system instead of true proportional representation as in European democracys . The failure of Capitalism and the failure of nations is made of such stuff...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030...?ie=UTF8&psc=1
http://www.amazon.com/Price-Inequali...oseph+stiglitz
http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-W...1596510&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/178...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Sukumvit Boy, have you read all of those or are you working through some of them now?

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Originally Posted by sukumvit boy

Hey stavros , I see that your reading list parallels mine with regard to concern about the the future of our economic /political systems since we both read Joseph Stieglitz's " The Cost of Inequality".
My thoughts revolve around issues such as : Is the Trump election a symptom of the deep dissatisfaction with a political and economic system where real wages for the average citizen have not increased since the 1970's , while 1% of the populace controls 99% of the wealth and in America , any third ( or more )political party is doomed to failure in our" winner takes all" political system instead of true proportional representation as in European democracys . The failure of Capitalism and the failure of nations is made of such stuff...

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The point of interest is the way in which trends come and go. You may be old enough to recall the books on modern life and resource management, such as Future Shock, Small is Beautiful, and the books by Ivan Illich such as Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality (which these days have been succeeded by books by Steve Pinker and Michio Kaku). Set beside these were the 'personal development' works that ranged from the religious/spiritual works of Alan Watts and Krishnamurti through the 'anti-psychology' of RD Laing and Thomas Szasz, the revival of Nietzsche, the fetish for that most peculiar nonsense of Carlos Castaneda, and the vogue for Marxism and 'protest' literature from Gramsci via Marcuse to Alinsky, Fanon and the Black Power movement. If these were eclipsed in the 1980s by the vogue for structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction, it may be a reflection of the decline of industry in the west (though most of Derrida's important works were published in the 1960s and early 1970s) and the growth of post-modernism as an expression of post-industrialism though few then or now read much of the late Andre Gorz and probably too many read Foucault's 'horizontal' critiques of power. But what these trends show is how the literature of change became a literature of adaptation. There was to be no revolution, only survival.

What I thus see in the books you have cited is a delayed reaction to the way capitalism has evolved since the 1980s, but I wonder if Robert Reich in particular is willing to take responsibility for being an architect of the widening gap between rich and poor and the erosion of the Democrat Party's affiliation with a declining working class.

It seems to me that there are other trends at work here. The short term trend can be stated simply: the Democrats were desperate for power and the Presidency, and won the White House when Clinton in effect accepted the legacy of Ronald Reagan but pledged to manage capitalism better than he did. To the extent that the Clinton Presidency inherited Reagan's colossal debt, but left the US with a budget surplus, Clinton succeeded, but accepting the Reagan legacy meant a lenient attitude to the off-shoring of production at the expense of America jobs and a 'regulation-lite' approach to banking and the financial sector which meant that even after the Savings & Loans failures of the Bush Presidency, the sector carried on without the regulation it maybe should have had. There was a similar trend in Europe with the Labour Party under Blair desperate to win elections and trading in their working class inheritance for a middle class vote and a relaxed attitude to wealth, whereas in Germany after Kohl, the CDU has re-established itself as the party of power by moving to the left to such an extent that the latest Grand Coalition with the SPD must make many Germans wonder what the point is of voting. But that also raises questions as to why the Green Party surged throughout the 1980s but failed to grow after unification, notably in the East where the SPD is also weak.

But there is a longer term way of approaching this, which is to argue that the industrial revolution that began in the 18th century ended in the 1970s as there were no new developments in industrial production, but a new revolution in computing and communications technology that has transformed 'the means of production' and the 'social relations of production' as Marx would put it, except that there has been a dislocation between the two, not only trashing a key component of Marx's critique of capitalism, but helping to widen the gap between those who benefit from the 'knowledge economy' and those left out of it, doomed, it seems, to a life on welfare or the magical realism of a Dickensian, overnight win on the lottery. This is not covered in the interesting set of essays in the two-volume Cambridge History of Capitalism, that was published in 2014.

But, and this I think is important, had China not industrialized in the old fashioned way after 1984, would we have had globalization and the phenomenal growth of wealth that we have had since then? Not at the level we have experienced. In fact, I would go as far as to say that China's industrial growth rescued capitalism from its moribund decade, and that it is simply coincidental that it took place as the USSR collapsed and in turn created for capitalism in the 1990s an expansion of markets -and consumers- that had not been seen since the last quarter of the 19th century in North America and central Europe, with the added benefit of huge -and hugely profitable- mineral resources in Russia and Central Asia that had previously been closed to international business.

It is hypocritical for your President to attack China without which he would not have either the capital or the goods he sells that are made Anywhere but America. Without China there would be no affordable smart phones, tablets and computers; no affordable shirts, shoes and trousers; no affordable long-haul holidays in Thailand or South Africa, and so on. Far from attacking China, we should maybe thank it and its workers for accepting levels of pay that were unacceptable indeed impossible in Pennsylvania in 1989 and China is still more competitive than the US can match for the simple reason that capitalism survives on cheap costs and high returns.

But who gets the rewards? As Stiglitz has argued, the politics of re-distribution that distinguished Labour from Conservative was dumped for market opportunities masquerading as personal choice at a time when the household income that was supposed to make this feasible was not growing as fast as the cost of living. The result is not just the dislocation of production from society, but of society from politics with a generation that was born into guaranteed work now facing no work, or re-training for jobs that were once done by school-kids at weekends for pocket money. In the US this is complicated by the legacy of race, in the UK as we have seen by the EU and immigration. Above all, I think that this cluster of factors that Stiglitz in particular is good on, has bred the resentment that fed into the anger and aggression of the 2016 US campaign and the EU Referendum in the UK, both characterised as Cambridge Analytica would put it, by the replacement of truth with lies and emotion.

The bleak view is that resentment being a negative emotion cannot solve the problem of millions of Americans in search of gainful employment and security; the more positive view is that people adapt. Millions of women used to work as telephone operators and typists. Those jobs disappeared yet there are now more women in work than ever before, so something happened to fill the gap when one set of jobs disappeared and so there is no reason to despair. BUT- I think that there is the geographical problem that new jobs may not appear in all places at the same time; the 'racial' problem that in the US means some people may benefit more than others; and the wider resource problem that water deficit areas may not be sustainable forcing people to move -from south to north in the case of the south-west of the US.

Crucially, and I think your selection of books makes the point, the ruthless profile of capitalism may have to be modified and the concept and practice of 'fair shares' and a more equitable re-distribution of wealth return to the agenda to end the alienation and resentment of citizens, and revive their sense of belonging in the state. But this was at the heart of John Rawls A Theory of Justice and that was published in 1971. At the moment, Republicans would dismiss it as 'socialism' yet the irony may be that for all the failures of Marx, the future may have to be more socialist in a broad sense, or be lost to a dystopian nightmare of greed, desperation and violence -and that is a whole other set of books to read!

Thanks for those interesting comments and speculations which move me to agreement and further exploration of some of the books and issues you mentioned. I certainly want to read Rawls's ,"A Theory of Justice " and see if I can find a reasonably priced set of ,"The Cambridge History of Capitalism" . And yes, I remember the various trends that you mentioned and read those books , some of which ,like the Casteneda , were complete nonsense.
I was wondering what you think of Richard Wolff ,as I find myself particularly enamored by the 'worker's cooperative ' experiments such as Mondragon for which he expresses such a fondness. And , as you say a modification of the current "ruthless profile" of capitalism certainly seems to be what is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
With regard to politics , America needs a more diversified system of representation , more proportional representation as in your Parliament. We have reached a point where the 'Tweedledee and Tweedledum ' of the Democrats and Republicans , and the 'winner takes all' mindset just is not working anymore.

In retrospect I may not have been very clear - I see those earlier books as dealing with the anxieties of living in a modern capitalist state than being about capitalism itself so the personal development books offered alternative ways of living to the 'rat race', whereas at the time most of the books on capitalism as such were partisan, being written by libertarians like Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard and in the UK Patrick Minford and a stable of writers at the Institute of Economic Affairs; or they were Marxian critiques. If there is a time lag involved, it may be that it is only after policy makers have moved on that they can reflect on their time in government, but also the 2008 crisis that appeared to bring an end to the so-called 'Neo-liberal' regime established by Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl forced some reflection that emerged in the 'what went wrong' books.

The dilemma for the left, particularly in the UK is that on the one hand there is evidence that the post-war consensus that was built on Attlee's reforming government of 1945 and was maintained by Churchill, Eden and MacMillan presided over economic growth and a more equitable distribution of wealth. As often happens, either politics is more ambitious that economics will allow, or economic changes advance ahead of political change, and with capitalism it appears that the growth of computing and automation took policy makers unawares, but energy price crises in the 1970s obscured the deeper changes that were taking place to production. The State then became, in the UK the guarantor of jobs in failing companies, in particular motor car manufacture entered a crisis in the 1970s and with inflation it became absurd for the State to use taxes to prop up firms with no commercial value. So on the one hand people want some form of state guarantee or backup, but don't want their taxes raised for white elephants. Labour under Corbyn promising to spend billions on domestic industry and jobs sounds too good to be true, but there has also to be something that restores faith in the economy and the ability to live reasonably well and while jobs are key to that, the trend in recent years for low-wage jobs, short-term or zero-hours contracts makes structural change harder than I think Labour understand.

We don't have proportional representation in Parliamentary election in the UK, though it exist for local elections in Northern Ireland. There was a referendum on the electoral system in 2011 when PR was rejected. It sounds democratic but in fact it tends to produce parliaments with no overall control and deals with parties that can often see the largest party form a government with parties that have less than 10 or 15% of the vote. The thought of PR in the UK with someone like Nigel Farage making a deal with the Tories that makes him Home Secretary is chilling, and I would not recommend it.

I am away for the Easter weekend into April and will respond to any more posts when I return.

Tom Wolfe has died in New York. He has many admirers, and was an accomplished writer, of that there is no doubt, be it the 'new journalism' essays on American culture be it The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Right Stuff (an outstanding film too) or novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities. My own favourite is The Painted Word, a short book which packs a punch, aimed at the means whereby influential New York art critics created a market worth millions of dollars that Wolfe argued was worth nothing.

The problem is that while Wolfe was an eloquent conservative critic of 'counter-culture' and its derivatives- in fact there is a superior critique of the counter-culture in The Radical Soap Opera: Roots of Failure in the American Left (1974) by David Zane Mairowitz- it is not so clear what his alternative was, what it is that he was for. Moreover, the more recent interview with him suggests he was more comfortable as a critic than an advocate, and thus the opposite of William F. Buckley who made a point of offering a conservative alternative to New Deal economics. He is thus not very intelligent when comparing the Republican and Democrat candidates in the 2016 Election -"I have no idea who to vote for", while one of his last books - The Kingdom of Speech- is devoted to ridiculing the concept of the Big Bang, Darwin and what to him is the failure of Chomsky and others to tell us where language comes from -a critique that offers no alternative theories of his own.

An enjoyable read, but his flamboyant style lacks the elegance of Dorothy Parker, and there is in some of his work a whiff of anti-semitism which comes across as the self-invented snobbery of a 'Southern Gentleman' who thinks selling stock on Wall St may suit the grandson of the Shtetl but is far beneath his aspirations as an American.

just to lower the tone: harry harrison's invasion earth. a lovely slice of pulp sf.

I'm reading two. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Sabriel by Garth Nix.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/20...human-history/

Just finished this sci-fi short story by [trans] writer Jamie Berrout called THE WAITING ROOM about a story in the future about a trans woman and an android woman who are both waiting for their consultation at a surgical clinic.
You can download the PDF here

Fear, by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

I paid £20 for this book earlier today and have so far read the first 10 chapters. I would not call the book rubbish - I have not read all of Woodward's books so I don't know if this is his worst, but as it appears to be an assembly of notes and personal comment I am not really sure it merits the attention it has received.

If you think the current occupant of the White House is an idiot, a moron, a narcissistic arrogant and lying 'son of a bitch' and a danger to world peace, you don't need to read this book to have your prejudice confirmed. There are some vignettes, as reported in the Press though the first that had me laughing (in a coffee shop where I took the book after purchase) concerns Paul Manafort who did not realize when he opened a Twitter account that it was public, and revealed his membership of a New York City bondage and swingers club called 'Decadence'.

In the rush to both assemble the text and print it, I don't believe it was properly proof read. For example, in Chapter 5 when discussing the career of James Mattis in the Obama administration before he was sacked, reference is made to Leon Panetta when he was Defence Secretary, but this is not even noted in the text. The sentence in which he appears reads: Panetta told Mattis his stance on Iran put him in real trouble with the Obama White House. We already know that Obama was President, but just lobbing in 'Panetta' without a qualifying ID, eg, Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defence at the time, told Mattis... is unprofessional.

Other examples read like memos or notes, thus in Chapter 8 in a discussion of Russia's involvement in the 2016 election (a topic dealt with in several chapters) a paragraph begins: What has not been previously reported: and on the next page This has also not been previously reported: This is sloppy wrtiting from a man who has made his living using words.

That Woodward believes it was wrong of James Comey to add a rider to a memo on Russian involvement that also included the allegation the President paid prostitutes to piss on the same bed the Obama's slept in seems odd, just as the claim the Russians had full audio and video surveillance of the Presidential suit in the Moscow hotel suggests they must also have tapes of what the Obamas did when they were there.

As for the President, this is a man who loves money, yet in discussions on the economy doesn't understand why the US cannot just print as much money as it likes, which seems far-fetched to me.

I was expecting from Woodward a thoughtful book that would give me a detailed account of the origins of Presidential campaign and how and why it broke the mould of previous elections -none of this so far. I wanted deeper background on the Man himself and what motivates him -nothing so far. I am looking for portraits of key figures from Ivanka to Kushner and particularly Stephen Miller: so far nothing. I want a narrative structured chronologically to build a momentum from 2010 to where we are today: no such narrative structure exists, just chapters that seem to appear at random -this one on the campaign, then Russia, then NATO, then Russia, and so on.

I shall labour it out and read it to the end, but so far this is a big disappointment.

There is a negative review here-
https://mashable.com/article/fear-wo...p/?europe=true

I have now finished reading Fear, by Bob Woodward, and as I suggested above, it tells the reader little about the President they do not already know. The question, what is this book for? seems to me to have an answer, to save the Presidency as a respectable institution in American political life.

One concludes from the book that what upsets Woodward so much are not the policies, but the style and lack of substance in a man so clearly unfit for the job, whose crude rhetoric, lack of interest or curiosity in the world around him, and the ease with which he insults and abuses his staff when insisting he is always right, undermines the purpose of the Presidency which is to lead the country by example. On key issues the solution is simple: Afghanistan: cant win, costs too much: get out. Or, stay in but take the minerals and get rich doing so. South Korea: costs too much, South Korea should pay for ther own defence: get out. Tariffs makes sense: impose as many as you can. Immigration is bad: so stop it. Bashar al-Asad is a bastard: so kill him. And so on.

As for the sources, it seems clear to me by their ubiquity in the book that the sources are Steve Bannon, Rob Porter, Senator Lindsay Graham, John Kelly and the lawyer John Dowd who surely is the source for the all but verbatim account of his meeting with Robert Mueller that forms the last chapter in the book.

Woodward has spent decades cultivating key sources in Washington DC: the military, the intelligence community, and Congress. For this reason there is a lack of alternative sources. Rupert Murdoch for example, who has been a 'confidant' of every Republican President since Reagan, is a key figure owing to his ownership of Fox News, but is only mentioned once in the book when Kushner and Ivanka are on his yacht. Thus there is also no mention of the Fox team that work so hard to maintain a postive profile for the President and his policies, and thus no additional material from the supposedly influentiual Evangelical Preachers, and nothing on supporters who are Governors.

If there is a lack of background from anyone outside the Beltway, there are three deep problems with Woodward's book.

The first is that Woodward has no deep understanding of some of the issues in the book. Like a Washington trained parrot, he illustrates his pathetic ignorance of Lebanon by calling Hezbollah a 'terrorist organization', a 'state within a state' funded by Iran and a strategic threat to Israel, as is Iran. At no time does Woodward show the slightest understanding of how Hezbollah came to be the largest party in Parliament in Lebanon, let alone a single thought on what rights Lebanon and Iran have to defend themselves from nuclear Israel. Similarly, Saudi Arabia comes and goes as a US ally without even the hint that it is a brutal, undemocratic, threatening regime that provided most of the 9/11 Hi-jackers, has funded the terrorist Taliban for decades, and has the long-term aim to replace the Ottoman Empire as the sole Caliphate in the MIddle East with all that implies for the existence of Israel.

But this is because of the second major absence in the book identified by the advice Deep Throat gave him: Follow the Money. There are a couple of references to the President going berserk when told the Mueller enquiry is looking into his finances, but where are Woodward's 'deep background' sources to give him the information on how much many the President has, in how many onshore and offshore bank accounts does it rest, tax free, and how much of it, before, during and after the 2016 campaign came from Russian and Arab sources? Felix Sater is mentioned once, as if Woodward was barely interested in a business partner of the President who is also a convicted felon and intermediary for the Russian mafia.

Because the third omission is the most startling of all: Woodward does not see any traction in the 'Russian collusion' claims. If it is astonishing, consider that while Woodward notes the appeal the candidate made to Russia to help him attack Hillary Clinton -twice in one day-, he does not take it further. But here is the problem: if it is the case that the Russian interference in the US election was in legal terms an 'attack' on the US, then the Republican Candidate, by seeking support from a state that was attacking the USA for his own attack on a US citizen is literally committing Treason. That this argument has not been pursued is surely a dereliction of duty. But Woodward is soft on this issue, referring briefly to Wikileaks, not at all to Cambridge Analytica.

As for the powerful women the President hates- Christine Lagarde, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon-, not one of them gets a mention in this book. Melania occasionally flits in and out, often in the middle of these hastily written chapters, and for all their affection there is no suggestion they have a sexual relationship, which could raise the question, does the President?

In the end this was a rushed job, and it shows. It is written by a liberal Republican who wants to remove the current President from office because he is so crazy and dangerous, but is committed to the very kind of compromising, collegiate Presidency that is lacking. Spare a final thought for the American people, who only exist in this book as a 'crowd', having little or no character, a set of vague rights and demands, and no access at all to the circes of power that revolve around Woodward's ferocious and ever deepening swamp.

brian keene - ghoul. reasonable horror, a little bit stephen king meets light weight splatterpunk.

Becoming Michelle Obama (Viking, 2018)

This is an eloquent, often moving, and I hope inspiring book for those who feel they don't have the capacity to improve themselves. The book is in three parts, a childhood and youth in Chicago, marriage and maturity with Barack, and in the third, the experience of being the 'First Lady' of the USA. The first part is the strongest and most interesting, setting an important background in the 'just coping' end of Black Chicago with a very strong family infrastructure and two parents who were always firm but gave Michelle and her brother the space in which to grow on their own terms. Her career at Princeton and as a lawyer in Chicago gives the reader a strong sense of her belief in social justice, while her courtship with her husband has some delightful moments. So strongly woven is the first and to a lesser extent the second phase, I felt the third and last was a bit rushed and mostly concerned with the difficulties of raising two children in the White House. There is little gossip about Washington politics, some recollections of meeting Mandela and Queen Elizabeth but few other politicians make it into the book, the one exception being some negative comment on the man who succeeded her husband to occupy the White House.

A good read and recommended.

why does the digit eight become an emoji? How to stop it?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Stavros

why does the digit eight become an emoji? How to stop it?

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Put a space between the 8 and the bracket, 8 )

Many thanks, I thought there would be a simple way of doing it!

Dark Tower series by mister King, quite a read if you like this type of literature.

The 7 and a half deaths of evelyn hardcastle-this book is described as Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day and it's a good description. It involves a murder at a high profile event and the main character wakes up each day inhabiting the body of a different person at the party.

It was well reviewed and though the ending is good because it explains what is otherwise a strange premise, it gets tedious in the middle. The author is very pleased with his ability to bury dozens and dozens of clues in the middle of the book that the main character sees pieces of from the perspective of each person at the party. This makes for interesting reading at first but the novelty wears off.

In conclusion: I found it exciting at the beginning, tedious in the middle, but wrapped up surprisingly well at the end. Might be worth a look.

Currently re-reading War and Peace for maybe the 5th time. I used to read current fiction and some alleged non-fiction, but now I just stick to the classics - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Nabokov, et al.

Modern fiction is occasionally entertaining. Mostly it's formulaic and dull, and that's not merely an opinion. I strongly advise anyone who feels patronized by modern fare to get off the media tit and suckle instead at the ever-flowing fountain of classical thought.

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Originally Posted by Nick Danger

Currently re-reading War and Peace for maybe the 5th time. I used to read current fiction and some alleged non-fiction, but now I just stick to the classics - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Nabokov, et al.

Modern fiction is occasionally entertaining. Mostly it's formulaic and dull, and that's not merely an opinion. I strongly advise anyone who feels patronized by modern fare to get off the media tit and suckle instead at the ever-flowing fountain of classical thought.

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I've read at least one work from each of the authors you mention above but three of them only because I took Russian Literature in college, so I also read Turgenev and Lermontov. I also find most of the popular fiction to be pretty bad and I don't have high standards. I've already said this in the thread but a decent compromise I think are detective novels from forty or fifty years ago. Jim Thompson, Ross Macdonald, John D. Macdonald, Donald Westlake, etc. The writing was simply better but the subject matter every bit as dark. I think I've read pretty much everything from these four. I also read Dashiell Hammett's The Red Harvest and though it had some bright spots was not my favorite. A bit convoluted if I'm honest.

Occasionally I'll go outside that genre and read sci fi or spy novels. Read The Stars My Destination recently which I enjoyed a lot and A Coffin For Dimitrios by Eric Ambler which was pretty good. This helps me avoid having to grapple with the big ideas while I'm reading for enjoyment but doesn't force me to read a lot of the absolute garbage that makes the bestseller lists (ie. James Patterson, Stuart Woods, even Harlan Coben….occasionally a decent plot but awful prose and embarrassingly bad ideas).

Kevin O'Rourke, A Short History of Brexit (2019)
Although a biased account, as the author has Irish/Danish roots and lives part of the year in France, the book is a well-written view of what Brexit means and how it happened, tracing the UK's relationship with the EU from the detached views of the 1950s through the 1960s rejection by France to membership and beyond in 1973. O'Rourke is particularly good on Anglo-Irish complications and the extent to which the notorious 'Backstop' in Northern Ireland reflects age-old suspicions and enmities for geographical as well as political reasons.
The book does not really address some of the issues around sovereignty and 'ever closer union' but is recommended for anyone not exhausted by Brexit who wants an insight into what it means.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/b...el-maddow.html