The Body Keeps the Score
Very interesting and informative book about psychological trauma. I think it may be applicable to many people who don’t believe that they’ve been traumatized because trauma is a strong word, but the experience of trauma is probably more like a spectrum in which everyone has some degree of it. It explains some of the science […]
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A People’s History of the United States
This book tells the history of the United States from the perspective of the common people rather than from the perspective of political leaders and elites. I think it is a useful supplement to the usual historical narrative, though for me it was quite boring and hard to get through. I finished it because I […]
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The History of Pandemic Lockdowns in the US
Deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic are still occurring, but this provides a picture of how COVID-19 currently compares to previous pandemics. During the 1918 pandemic “Social distancing measures were introduced, for example closing schools, theatres, and places of worship, limiting public transportation, and banning mass gatherings. Wearing face masks became common in some places, such […]
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The communist roots of Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors referred to herself and cofounder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recorded interview. [1] The third cofounder, Opal Tometi, wrote an article praising the socialist dictatorship of Venezuela, saying “We stand with the Venezuelan people as they build a revolutionary and popular democracy based on communal power”. [2] […]
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Seeing Like a State
This book goes deep into a discussion of how states operate and why their central planning schemes are often very destructive. The first part of the book talks about how states attempt to make their citizens and resources more “legible”, meaning easier to measure and administrate. The second part is about “high modernism”, the naive […]
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Smart and SeXy
This book is one of the most information dense books I’ve read, it felt like almost every sentence was providing a new fact and there are a ton of citations. Also one of the least politically correct books I’ve read. The first half of the book goes pretty deep into genetics related to sex chromosomes […]
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The Illusion of the Self
The Buddhist concept of non-self says that the self is an illusion, but the meaning of this is subtle and requires some elaboration. First we need to distinguish what I’ll call the “concept of self” and the “sense of self”. The concept of self is what you cognitively think of yourself as. The sense of […]
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We need to stop the lockdowns
The CDC says “In the coming months, most of the U.S. population will be exposed to this virus” (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summary.html). “A panel of experts at the University of California, San Francisco, predicted that between 40 and 70% of Americans could become infected within the next 18 months” (https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-150-million-americans-may-get-infected-2020-3?op=1). The lockdowns are not going to stop or […]
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The Coddling of the American Mind
I didn’t really learn much new from reading this book; just reading the summary online covered most of the points, and I expected this, but I decided to read it anyways because I became more interested in the topic and wanted to use the book as a way to help me ponder it a bit […]
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Against the Grain
Somewhat dry but really interesting thesis that grain agriculture was uniquely suited to taxation which enabled the formation of early states. Emphasized that early states may have been worse places to live than the surrounding areas outside of state control and how states were effectively farms for domesticating, breeding, and enslaving humans.
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