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[DragonGirl]

Time for a good old fashioned book discussion and recommendation. Currently I'm reading Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire I'm about 100 pages into its 440 total and I'm enjoying (and am appalled but not surprised by) the content. Here's a snip from the Amazon page.

Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.

Considering recent history, I suppose I've been attracted to books that try to give some logical foundation to US lunacy. So far I recommend it highly, though with a warning to religious folks. The book takes all forms of belief to task and is often rather impolite about it.

Earlier in the year I also read It's Even Worse than it Looks Was. Here's a snip from the Amazon page.

Hyperpartisanship has gridlocked the American government. Congress's approval ratings are at record lows, and both Democrats and Republicans are disgusted by the government's inability to get anything done. In It's Even Worse than It Looks, Congressional scholars Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein present a grim picture of how party polarization and tribal politics have led Congress—and the United States—to the brink of institutional failure.

In this revised edition, the authors bring their seminal book up-to-date in a political environment that is more divided than ever. The underlying dynamics of the situation—extremist Republicans holding government hostage to their own ideological, anti-government beliefs—have only gotten worse, further bolstering their argument that Republicans are not merely ideologically different from Democrats, but engaged in a unique form of politics that undermines the system itself. Without a fundamental change in the character and course of the Republican Party, we may have a long way to go before we hit rock bottom.

This is another book I highly recommend, though reading this stuff is a bit depressing and, more usefully, infuriating.

The final book I want to call attention to is The Rightous Mind, which is more philosophical than political but a good companion to all the rest of this stuff. Snip from the Amazon page.

As America descends deeper into polarization and paralysis, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done the seemingly impossible—challenged conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to everyone on the political spectrum. Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, he shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.

I'm not really a fan of the author, Jonathan Haidt, and I'm not fully convinced by some of the conclusions he draws (or speculates) in the latter half of the book, but the first few chapters offer a useful, perhaps even enlightening lens into viewing the differences between liberal and conservative minds.

So, there's a start. Also, this isn't just a thread for recommended reads. If you want to talk about a book that's awful for one reason or another, go for it, but keep it to books covering politics, either directly or via history or philosophy.

 

[RastaMentality]

everyone should read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

 

[DragonGirl]

everyone should read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Here's a snip from the Amazon page.

Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.

Looks interesting, I've added it to my reading list.

 

[Kimawolf]

I recommend EVERYONE to read Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that America's government and its corporate giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend make the national media propagandisticthe major three being the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media's close links to and often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV, newspapers and radio distort world events. For example, the authors maintain that "it would have been very difficult for the Guatemalan government to murder tens of thousands over the past decade if the U.S. press had provided the kind of coverage they gave to the difficulties of Andrei Sakharov or the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland." Such allegations would be routine were it not for the excellent research behind this book's controversial charges. Extensive evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our freedoms is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system that panders to the interests of America's privileged and neglects its duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at stake. First serial to the Progressive.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

 

[DragonGirl]

I recommend EVERYONE to read Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Another one that looks good. I'll add it to my list. If anyone has read these works, feel free to chime in on what you think. I'm still reading through Fantasyland and I'll add some thoughts on it once finished.

 

[Crom]

Donna Brazile's book confessing that Hillary Clinton rigged the primaries and was involved in actual collusion.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774

 

[The Scrivener]

Good deed for the day...

Found on Facebook.

Ebooks of many of Noam Chomsky's books are $1 each through November 8th as part of Haymarket Books' 90% off Ebook sale.

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/11-the-noam-chomsky-collection

 

[Alt183]

Essential Works of Socialism by Irving Howe is a great collection of writings and essays for those interested in the philosophy. A pretty dry read, but interesting if you want to see how many different thinkers would tackle problems, and of course, how they would argue with each other all the time.

 

[Soleil rouge]

Thanks, guys. Lots of good stuff here. My recommendation is Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Veins_of_Latin_America

In the book, Galeano analyzes the history of the Americas as a whole, from the time period of the European settlement of the New World to contemporary Latin America, describing the effects of European and later United States economic exploitation and political dominance over the region.

 

[Rest]

About the war in Ukraine:


In preorder: https://foreigner-group.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders