Some formatting issues occurred in the original 2025 Readings post and I don't know html so I can't fix it. So I'm gonna make this post the place where I try and start again. Stuff will follow ...
The first few essays all pretty much said the same thing: there is no Theory of Everything. After reading the first essay, the following essays fell flat-- the point had already been made. ... And the redundancy of essay topics truly blunted the edginess of any attempt at a novel argument. ... I will spare you my frustration about the jargon-filled and ego-laden, pseudo-arguments made in most of the essays – at least for now. On a positive note, a few of the essays did teach us something new, and made us think deeper, drawing us to lines of thought far-removed from our typical work and interests. Like Infinity by Max Tegmark! Who knew there is more than one type of infinity?! The essay on Entropy by Bruce Parker was similarly notable. It tackled a complex problem and was able to put in words the typical confusion many have when grappling with the concept of entropy, which measures the amount of disorder in a system. The idea also actually seems radical, and it is one of which I have never before heard. ... Notice that you don't need to own the book to read the essays, they are all freely available on edge.org.
The book had some good stuff. Apparently there's nothing to the idea that the language you speak molds your brain differently from people who speak a different language. I'm going to have to dig deeper into the ideas presented in Ross Anderson's "Some Questions Are Too Hard For Young Scientists To Tackle." But this is the sort of book you read when you have a lot of time to sit and think and read further. At least some of the essays, the interesting ones.
One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read and enjoyed as merely a chronological sequence of events in the lives of the Buendia family, but it helps to know something of the underlying meaning. Gabriel García Márquez uses a fantastic fictional story as an expression of reality, with myth and history overlapping. Myth serves as a vehicle to transmit history to the reader. For example, the characters in the novel experience the Liberal political reformation of their colonial way of life, the arrival of the railway, the Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902), the corporate hegemony of the “banana company,” the cinema, the automobile, and the massacre of striking workers.
The inevitable and inescapable repetition of history is a dominant theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Márquez reiterates the metaphor of history as a circular phenomenon through the repetition of names and characteristics belonging to the Buendía family. The characters are controlled by their pasts and the complexity of time. Throughout the novel the characters are visited by ghosts that are symbols of the past and the haunting nature that the past has over their lives.
I found the writing to be quite poetic at times. There was a sense of history and grandeur and folly and farce and wisdom. At other times I felt like Marquez was a little too in love with his own talent.
A friend of mine recommended that I read some stuff from US-American union organizer Jane F. McAlevey. Around about the same time, when I was still a subscriber to his YouTube channel, Jimmy Dore had her on as a guest:
In No Shortcuts, McAlevey critiques not only the failed business unionism adopted by most unions, but also what she describes as the “mobilizing” model adopted by many more progressive unions. The book describes a model of “deep organizing,” based on the methods used by the emerging radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions in the 1930s and ‘40s. This was a period when working-class militancy put its stamp on U.S. history. As a result of these militant strikes and struggles, the basic industries of auto, steel, rubber, and electricity were organized for the first time – changing U.S. history. She also discusses the central importance of community organizing as an essential companion piece to powerful workplace organizing.
...
McAlevey draws a sharp distinction between three different organizing models: Advocacy, Mobilizing, and Organizing. She describes how “Advocacy,” the dominant method of mainstream union leaders, looks to use the courts and political lobbying to win one-time gains and does little or no mobilizing. It is ineffective and does not raise the consciousness of workers. Otherwise described as business unionism, it looks to work out an agreement with the bosses without mobilizing the workers.
The dominant section of the current union leadership see the power of the union rooted in their own “persuasive skills.” At the same time, they seek to find “common ground” with the boss. They see workers as bargaining chips. They see possible outcomes as limited by the “existing political climate,” i.e., the limits of capitalism. Example of this can be found through a quick glance at the methods of the current leadership of the UAW, the building trades, and Teamsters.
She contrasts this to the “mobilizing” model, which, while giving the appearance of being bolder and more dynamic, is very shallow and ineffective. Its central weakness is that it fails to organize an expanding base among workers, thus failing to develop the overall strength of the labor movement.
One chapter exposes the methods of David Rolf and SEIU Local 775 in Northwest Washington State, and the broader SEIU leadership among health care workers between 2005 and 2007 as a particularly obnoxious example of that strategy. In this campaign the workers were used as pawns in an elaborate scheme to use the union contract to get concessions from the Washington legislature to fund the employers, to then pay for a terrible union contract. In this whole process, the workers were passive by-standers.
Her model, by contrast is a return to “deep organizing” of workers in the workplace as done by CIO and that seeks to transform consciousness and is a starting point to sustained struggle.
...
McAlevey stresses that real power rests with the workers themselves. Her deep-organizing model can be broken down into the following steps:
Only strikes can win real gains and we need to build power in the workplace to win a strike
Success depends on workers building networks in the workplace
The first essential step is to identify natural leaders who can build such networks
That involves challenging these leaders to accept the risks and responsibilities
These leaders then need to build powerful teams around them
The strength of these teams needs to be tested through escalating public actions.
Workers need to build support in all areas of their life outside the workplace. The more fundamental the struggle, the stronger the structure that needs to be built. Only then will workers be prepared for what it will take to win.
If you didn't click on it, that review was from Socialist Alternative. (The top of the google search.) Here's some links to some other reviews:
Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts is an exciting book. It tells the stories of important struggles and it tackles the big questions facing the labor movement. McAlevey is a former staffer, organizer, and national leader of the Service Employees (SEIU) on the losing side of a power struggle, then an academic and now a consultant.
Readers will recognize the concepts McAlevey promotes as driving many of the rank-and-file struggles reported in Labor Notes over the years. She explains them well and provides historical context. If on some topics she “bends the stick” too far and misses some important subtleties or complications, she is bending it in the right direction.
McAlevey builds her argument with five cases. She compares the approaches of two nursing home organizing efforts in what she calls “Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle.” She goes into depth on the Chicago Teachers Union strike of 2012, the successful organizing of giant Smithfield Foods in a right-to-work state, and the development of Make the Road New York, a model of community organizing.
McAlevey argues that a movement needs serious power to win serious outcomes, and this power comes from engaging organic leaders who already have influence. This specifically contrasts with the approach taken by most NGOs, and many unions, who engage with people McAlevey calls “activists” who already support the cause but don’t necessarily have a following. Instead of taking the shortcut of working with activists (which might be sufficient for a mobilising approach and low concession costs), No Shortcuts suggests doing the deeper, harder work, of winning over organic leaders.
The reasoning for this is twofold. Firstly, building majority power in a “bounded constituency” (such as is required for a strike) makes it necessary to reach out to every person in that constituency, regardless of their “preexisting interest in the union”. Real power means a committed majority, and that can’t be achieved by only working with an activist minority that already supports the cause: “because the goal is building majorities of a bounded constituency, organizers are constantly forced to engage people who may begin with little or no initial interest in being a part of any group”.
Secondly, it’s worth taking the time to identify and win over “organic leaders” because they already have influence in a workplace. Rather than find people who are supportive and work to build their influence, you find people who are influential and work to build their support. McAlevey argues that developing these leaders is more valuable than training “random volunteers”, as they start “ with a base of followers”. “They”, she notes, “are the key to scale.” So, although organic leaders don’t necessarily support the union (or the cause), they are a natural target because they have influence in the constituency and will shape the views and behaviour of other constituents.
Is this concept relevant outside union organising? While it makes sense to speak of leaders in a workplace, or in a faith community, does it make sense to talk about leaders in civil society in the same way? Outside the shop floor, are there community member who are also organic leaders — who are influential, with a base of followers?
The answer, probably, is yes. But more importantly, the key distinction here is between activists who may display commitment and “leaders” who can move others to act. Recruiting activists is not the key to scale and, in fact, limits scale. If you are using resources to train and coordinate activists who are very supportive but can’t move others to act, you won’t be able to create the sort of distributed leadership structure that mean you can scale up the operation without saddling a few professional staff with an ever-growing workload. Being able to identify leaders, distinguish activists from leaders, win over leaders and develop them as necessary, is the key to building majority power — because leaders build your capacity to grow to scale.
The part about the difference between "leaders" and "activists" reminded me of a chapter in a book I read in university The Romance of American Communism (which I see came out in a new edition in 2020). There was one interview with a CPUSA member who went from university into the factories to spread the socialist gospel but who found that he was more a bookish nerd than leader of the proletariat. He mentioned how genuine leaders would be talking during some workplace struggle and how on the occasions when he did speak up the natural leader (and the few others who bothered to acknowledge his existence) regarded him with pity.
Speaking of memories of other books, in the chapter where McAlevey contrasts the different methods employed in unions for nursing home unions in New England and Washington State, she mentions the radical, worker-driven local 1199. Seeing that number reminded me of a book by an eloquent weirdo named Martin J. Levitt called Confessions of a Union Buster. Whatever his faults, I don't believe that Levitt fabricated the scene where his union busting firm had a dinner where they invited prospective clients from the nursing home industry and played a pro-union film about the 1199 Local to get them all fired-up about hiring the firm to crush further unionization drives.
In the film (Levitt writes) there is one scene with a close-up of a Black nursing home woman's face and she says "Just give me 11-9-9." Levitt says that the whole room erupted into racist jeers and muttering.
That chapter was pretty eye-opening. I remember hearing in the 1990's that unions were putting resources into organizing new members. The Washington State showed one cynical way of getting this done. Washington State's politicians are fairly sympathetic to unions. (Relatively speaking.) The SEIU convinced employers to let them organize the workers, give them an extra dollar an hour, and in return for a no-strike pledge (promised by the organizers with no input from the workers), taking lots of workplace issues off the table, and successfully lobbying the state legislature to subsidize the wage increase, the SEIU would get more dues-paying members.
Suffice to say, Local 1199 behaved completely different and subsequently gets MUCH better wages and working conditions.
To conclude, I pretty much agree with everything McAlevey says. People need to be "organized" instead of "mobilized." (By which I mean the specific useages of the words as intended by McAlevey.) All my ignored political campagins were dependent upon citizen activism and individual responsibilities. My personal long-term project, "Workers as Citizens" simply acknowledged the importance of a sympathetic political-legal system for successful unionization drives. At one time, unions were illegal, with the class-war reason being obscured by the legal justification that they were conspiracies in restraint of trade. It was "price-fixing" by labour.
It wasn't so much a successful common-law legal challenge that got unions recognized, so much as decades of brutal fighting and the concommitant political pressure that led to victories in Britain, the USA (especially under FDR) and in Canada. I believe that conditions for working class organization are still incredibly difficult today and that we need all the help that we can get. Workplace democracy is another form of individual worker agency that McAlevey says is so important.
I usually don't enjoy stories about worker struggles because, being a pessimist in my own head, I don't need to read about the defeats and sufferings of ordinary people. But McAlevey's book is a clearly written book mainly about victories and how they were achieved.
On pages 61 and 62 McAlevey talks about "settlement costs." What is it going to cost your enemy to concede something? If it costs very little, you might get it without much of a struggle. If it's going to cost them a lot, prepare for a fight. This obvious truth sadly escapes many on the left. As she writes on page 62:
An incorrect power analysis can lead people who want to end capitalism to think that small numbers of demonstrators occupying public spaces like parks and squares and tweeting about it will generate enough power to bring down Wall Street. Others might think that the good frames used for or derived from these occupations will marshal enough emotion to suddenly overwhelm lawmakers with the revelation that the system is unfair and the lawmakers then will institute a set of fair regulations to govern corporate capital.
In her last chapter, "Pretend Power vs. Actual Power" McAlevey talks about narrative frames and how working class organizations have to speak to workers in ways that they understand. And given the oligarchy's massive control of the hegemonic narrative and the resources they pour into sustaining and intensifying it, this means that socialist counter-narratives have an uphill struggle just to survive. I have said this over and over. "Democracy" should be our watchword. It costs us nothing to employ it. We believe in it after all. We don't have to reject words like "socialism" as the NDP stupidly did before incoherently trying to reclaim it a short while later.
This is an important book and a very worthwhile use of your time if you care about justice and an end to oligarchic insanity.
Apparently there was a series called "The Librarian."
In October 2021 I started a post: "Latest Reads." About a month later I decided to make it my one-stop shopping post for all the future books that I'd read. The post's title was amended to "Latest Reads: [NOW THWAP'S GIANT BOOK DEPOSITORY!!!!] I continued it into 2022. But that eventually became too unwieldy to edit. By Autumn 2022 I decided to start another post for the year's book readings in 2023 and here it is.
Just letting my vast readership know about how they can follow my vast readings at this post. I've decided to constantly update it to either just mention, or occasionally actually discuss my latest readings. Because the world needs to know.
So, after twenty years, the richest countries in the world (the USA and its NATO allies) were unable to construct a viable government that could meet the very modest expectations of the people of Afghanistan (one of the poorest countries in the world). Despite having spent literally TRILLIONS of dollars, the USA and its NATO allies were also unable to defeat a "Third World" insurgency, or to build an Afghan military force that could fight the insurgency autonomously. I don't know what sort of world you'd have to live in where you could constantly throw billions of dollars a month at a problem, and be genuinely indifferent and incurious about how nothing ever seems to improve. That's not my world. It's not the world of many leftists. Being critical thinkers, it is second-nature for us to acknowledge the realities that stare us straight in the face, look honestly for their causes, and think honestly about possible solutions. And if this self-praise sounds a little obnoxious, ... well, just consider how powerful people, being paid to think about and manage something like the Occupation of Afghanistan, showed themselves entirely incapable of doing the same thing that leftist critics of that occupation did for pretty much the entire twenty years of its existence. Which, in the end, produced articles like this:
"Nobody reads his blog anymore." Truer words were never spoken. Anyhow, here's the latest books that I've been reading:
AROOGA!!! AROOGA!!! IT'S AROUND A MONTH SINCE I POSTED THIS. I'VE BEEN DOING A LOT OF READING E-BOOKS ON PUBLIC TRANSIT & A FEW REGULAR BOOKS AS WELL WHEN I'M HOME. THIS IS WHERE I'LL POST A RECORD OF 'EM FOR MY NARCISSISTIC EDIFICATION! (INSTEAD OF HAVING TO MAKE A NEW POST THAT OTHER PEOPLE REALLY DON'T CARE ABOUT.) Now back to the original post ...
First off, I read a couple of books about "Exoplanets." These are planets outside of our solar system. The first one was by Ray Jayawardhana called Strange New Worlds. I had an edition from 2013 (or 2015) and a lot has happened since then. Jayawardhana does a good job of explaining the theories and the methods whereby astronomers somehow fucking observe the patterns of light from tiny planets a gajillion kilometres (or lots of light-years) away as they pass in front of, or around, or somewhere in the vicinity of stars 50, 100, 200 or more times their size. Sadly, for a lazy moron such as myself, there wasn't much in the way of science-fantasy descriptions of the weird and wonderful worlds found at the time of his writing. Probably because that would be speculation. Then I read Exoplanets: Diamond Worlds, Super Earths, Pulsar Planets, and the New Search for Life Beyond Our Solar System by Michael Summers and James S. Trefil. This book is from 2017 which meant it was written after more telescopes and satellites had come on line and even more exoplanets had been discovered. My take away from reading both of these books is that it's more likely than ever that we're alone in the galaxy. Both books talk a great deal about how we'd be able to find methane or oxygen from the light shifts emanating from exoplanets, signifying water or even life (as I dimly remember, both of those elements dissipate quickly and need to be replenished by things like plants or other lifeforms to be able to register in a planet's atmosphere) and so far they haven't found squat. It was kinda wild to read about rogue planets. These would be planets ejected from the solar systems where they were forming and which now float in the starless darkness of the endless void. At one point, one of the books mention how heat from radioactive elements in the planets or from tidal heating inside a moon circulating a rogue planet could theoretically provide the elements necessary for life even on these godforsaken places. I don't remember how they claim they know this, but both books state that there are way more rogue planets drifting about the Milky Way than there are planets orbiting stars. Finally, about orbiting stars: Earth is way out in the suburbs of the galaxy, halfway down one of the spiral arms. Closer in to the galactic centre wouldn't be a good place for life because the greater likelihood of cataclysms caused by nearby exploding stars.
Lately I've been reading George Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. As he has done in previous books (such as Heat or The Age of Consent), Monbiot shows he's not the sort of leftist author who spends 80% of his book describing problems with the remaining 20% dedicated to vague, generalized prescriptions for alternatives.
Starting off, I was struck by how similar Monbiot's centring of the importance of narrative for human affairs was to Caitlin Johnstone's writings on the subject. The Left has avoided "metanarratives" (such as Marxism) in response to the ways that the white, male dominated Old Left excluded feminists, racialized minorities, environmentalists and the eco-system, etc., from power and constructed institutions reflecting this exclusion and narrow-mindedness. (In so doing, the Left seems to have succumbed to the intellectual morass of post-structuralist confusion. Don't get me wrong. Reality IS chaos. But reality is also REAL. Whether you earn enough to not have to worry about homelessness is a condition that can be created by a focused, class-based politics. A Leftism that deliberately alienates ordinary people through the confused elevation of "identity politics" and conniptions about "micro-aggressions" is a Leftism that is quite compatible with gargantuan levels of social inequality and state violence.)
Monbiot's great narrative in Out of the Wreckage is that most human beings are altruistic and that we value things like community and cooperation. But a minority of people are motivated by selfishness. And these are the people who are driven to rise to the top of any social pecking order. Capitalism doesn't just reward hard workers and innovators. (Oftentimes it doesn't even reward these!) Capitalism (especially late-capitalism) rewards the ruthless, the cheaters, the already-powerful, anyone willing to betray colleagues, poison the environment, exploit the sick, kiss ass, steal ideas, etc., etc., ... assholes basically.
And it is neo-liberalism, propagated by economists like Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, that provides the grand narrative for these selfish attitudes to be rewarded. Instead of fellow human beings to be worked with, neo-liberalism instructs us to think of other people as individual rivals to compete against. This system inevitably creates atomization, precarity, alienation and loneliness and despair. (As well as a threatened eco-system.)
Monbiot does a great job describing how adherence to neo-liberal hegemony has been devastating to left-wing parties and to representative democracy generally. He talks about utilizing participatory budgeting and the Donut Economics of Kate Raworth.
I've got two other books to mention so I'll stop there ....
Next up is Eric Toussaint's The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation. I've read other books before about "Third World" debt, but Toussaint's book is the first one that so clearly emphasizes the massive fraud involved in 19th-Century international financing. So far I've read about the loans from (mainly) London bankers to South America and Mexico; London and Paris bankers to Greece; Paris bankers to Tunisia. The peoples of these countries would find themselves on the hook for bond payments that were sold at a discount (but which needed to be repaid at 100% of their value) by bankers who took commissions and fees that routinely amounted to 10% of the total loan. Oftentimes, domestic oligarchs got in on the action too, directing money raised by these loans to their own bank accounts or to the purchasing of substandard goods produced in their own factories. It's a story that really exposes the seflishness, inhumanity and hypocrisy of European capitalism and European imperialists.
Finally, I'm reading Edward Ashpole's Signatures of Life: Science Searches the Universe. I'm writing a Sci-Fi comedy (mostly for my own amusement) and I wanted some backgrounding in the realities (or, make that, "science-backed speculation") of alien evolution and the evolution of alien technology. Ashpole is a science writer, not (I do not think) a PhD-possessing, practicising scientist. Still, he does write about hard-science topics about the physical dangers of space travel; the enormous challenges of the distances in space-time involved; and the likely total incompatibility of space-travelling lifeforms with the alien eco-systems they're likely to encounter. Sometimes the book feels padded by repetition. But it says enough interesting things to keep me reading.
Yes. How was this great man (me) 's thinking influenced? What were the influences on his way of thinking?@?!?*%?#!???
This is MY BLOG and I'll write about whatever I want to write about!!!!
First off is Lawrence Rothfield's wonderful The Measure of Man: Liberty, Virtue, and Beauty in the Florentine Renaissance. Basically, the book is about the ups and downs and eventual triumph of the Medici family within the context of the Tuscan city of Florence as an autonomous republic. Florence was a city dedicated to wool textiles and banking (as well as other industries). In the feudal era society was divided into "Those who pray, those who fight and those who work." This meant that the Catholic clergy were supposedly the highest members of society, followed by the warrior aristocracy, with the farming peasants being subordinate. Theoretically, society was a unified whole, with the clergy maintaining the purity of everyone's soul and therefore the possibility of eternal life. The aristocracy defended the society from outside enemies (especially infidel armies). And the peasantry provided the food that maintained the bodies of everyone. And, of course, everyone were all "Brothers and Sisters in Christ" and essentially equal in the eyes of the Lord.
Aside from the fact that there is no God, this fantasy broke down in practical terms because the lower levels of the clergy were often staffed by despised illiterates with impoverished backgrounds; the heights of the Church were manned by the sons of the nobility, and the nobility itself operated more of a protection racket than they acted as protectors of their society. The nobility, being ordinary human beings born into positions of power and privilege, and therefore not having any special abilities beyond what they were trained to do, were at heart, incredibly insecure. They knew how to fight because they were trained at it from early childhood. The ability to fight was then based on this training and on their own inborn physical and mental capabilities. Their literacy and culture was often denied to the subordinate ranks and their whole self-perception as innately superior was based on excluding others from opportunity. They would always reinforce their supposed superiority by treating the people who provided their food and their income (from rent payments) as garbage.
Banking and profits from industry gave Florence's merchant class the liquid wealth to be able to afford education, luxury goods and (importantly) money for mercenary soldiers which they used to break the power of local nobles who attempted to extort payments in order to allow the city to export through their lands. As bankers, merchants and craftsmen, Florentine captialists were classed as "commoners" on the same level as peasants or wage workers. As such, no matter how wealthy they became they were despised by the nobility. Even when the Florentine's mercenaries successfully attacked and tore down the towers of the surrounding noblemen, there was still a socia gap that the nobility did everything in its power to maintain.
This is taking too long. Suffice to say that Rothfield does an excellent job of describing the class conflicts and cultural tensions of Renaissance Florence, as they struggle to maintain their status as a Merchant Republic in the face of the wealthy banking family of the Medici's attempts to establish themselves as aristocratic overlords. It is an important story in the tale of Western Civilization.
In this brilliant and widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions that existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and he analyses the ways of thinking and seeing that characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity.
Developing a distinctive sociological approach, Peter Burke is concerned not only with the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and others, but also with the social background, patterns of recruitment, and means of subsistence of this ‘cultural elite.’ He thus makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance, and to our comprehension of the complex relations between culture and society.
Indeed. Burke takes on much of the scholarship that has been produced since the first edition of his book came out many moons ago. There's been a lot more written about the continuities from the Medieval period to the Renaissance. A lot more histories centered on women as well as on everyday life. This is a very big book about many important topics (especially the changing social status of artists, from despised craftsmen to exalted super-star celebrities/geniuses who the most powerful, elevated members of Italian society were often forced to accomodate). Very comprehensive so far as I can see.
For instance, Leonardo da Vinci, when arguing for the inclusion of painting among the genteel arts of poetry and music, states how a painter can work while wearing fine clothes in dignified surroundings (I suppose one had to ignore the plaster for frescos and the smell of oils for oil painting!) whereas the sculptor has to get covered in marble dust, which, when mixed with the sweat from their labours makes the sculptor look like a baker.
I took a chance on a work of fiction: Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys. This is the story told by a man who, when a lonely young boy, had a strange friendship with a reclusive odd-jobs man ("Rabbit Foot Bill" so named because he sells rabbit's feet which were once considered good luck charms) in his small Saskatchewan town. The boy witnesses his friend commit a murder and it obviously affects him. But as an adult the narrator comes into contact with his friend again and [to avoid spoilers I'll simply say] hijinx ensue.
The writing is good and the characterizations of the many minor characters are intriguing. My main problem is that the main character seems like somewhat of a cipher. He does make some decisions, but often seems to be carried along by events.
Finally, I'm reading The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo. A little while ago I tried to write some stupid science fiction about anti-matter engines and did a smattering of research and ended-up finding out that anti-matter had originally been predicted by British physicist Paul Dirac in his famous "Dirac Equation" which he wrote to reconcile special relativity with quantum mechanics. Evidently this was the first time that theoretical physics had predicted the existence of an undiscovered particle as opposed to explaining one that had been discovered in the laboratory through experimentation. Any writing about Paul Dirac soon brings up that he was a strange man. ("The strangest man" is how he was affectionately described by Niels Bohr.) (It's also almost always mentioned that Dirac and Cary Grant went to the same school together. I'm going to assume that readers don't need a link for Cary Grant. But who the fuck knows? Dirac was two years older so it's reasonable to assume they hardly knew the other existed. Especially since Dirac was so quiet and unsociable.)
Anyhow, the book is good telling of an interesting guy with a suprisingly interesting social life. The descriptions of the deep scientific ideas are fairly understandable for a moron such as myself. Faremlo does a very good job of situating Dirac's ideas and discoveries into the general progress of physics and quantum physics as a whole.
So that's my recent reading in June in the Year of our Lord 2021.
Hello Posterity. You might have heard of me. I'm "thwap." A practitioner of the dying hobby of "blogging." In the young childhood of the internet, many people heretofore excluded from the distribution channels of the mass media used the medium of "blogging" to get their ideas out to a potentially worldwide audience.
They typed essays and articles and diaries and musings. Whole books even. It was "citizen journalism" it was an online "marketplace of ideas." It was fresh and exhilarating an new. It was even impacting the public conversation on politics and policies.
Now of course, the youngsters and other lazy people are limiting themselves to unnuanced blurbs and shallow observations in 145-characters or less (or something, I don't know) on "Twitter."
In case you don't know, after some bad harvests (followed by a bumper crop that caused grain prices to plummet) there was social unrest all across Continental Europe. In the spring, in the face of massive urban uprisings, the French constitutional monarchy fell, the Kingdom of the Naples & Sicily, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Hapsburg Empire were all compelled to accept liberal ministers and call for parliamentary elections within their states' borders. By the end of the year however, reactionary forces regained the upper hand and by 1851, when Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis Napoleon, recently elected President of the Second Republic declared himself Emperor, it was all over with conservative triumphs across Europe. Both Britain and Russia remained relatively stable, with Britain extending moral support (and little else) to the constitutional monarchists, while Russia intervened diplomatically and militarily on the side of reaction.
Sperber does an excellent job of describing the social structure of Europe in the decades leading up to 1848. He also shows how the ideological importance of the French Revolution of 1789 weighed on the minds of everyone involved; some being inspired by it, others terrified of repeating it.
Railroads and advanced capitalism were disrupting the economy of Europe the way they'd disrupted Britain a few decades previously. The British ruling class had crushed the working class Chartist movement in their own country and Sperber argues that the uprisings of 1848 were caused by the same social-economic upheavals that had produced Chartism.
Cities had become more important to the running of states by 1848. It was no longer enough for a monarch to have a court that could travel from place to place. Capital cities, at the hubs or transportation and communication networks, as well as finance, had to be controlled to control the 19th Century state. When the barricades went up, most monarchs (impoverished by the Napoleonic wars and the economic turmoil that followed them) lacked the military wherewithal to strike back, hence their capitulation to the early demands of the revolution for constitutional assemblies and elections.
Karl Marx lived through this period. Indeed The Communist Manifesto was written and produced during the revolutions. In Marx's analysis, the liberal revolutionaries were not strong enough to push the feudal social order from power in 1848. Neither were the urban working classes. But the hints of continued class struggles were there for all to see. Liberal constitutionalists were a small, wealthy minority of commoners.
Lenin writes with a kind of sneering condescension about the ideas of others he disagrees with. But so far I find myself agreeing with him more than I disagree with him. I'm glad I took it off the shelf.
I recently finished Mount Pleasant by Don Gilmor. Somebody was giving it away in a cardboard box outside their house. I live on Mount Pleasant Avenue, so I figured "what the hell." It's a decent look at a middle-aged man's midlife crisis. It's a nice portrayal of the vicissitudes of the Rosedale set. And "Occupy Toronto" makes a presence.
I could identify with everything about the guy except his background and the fact that he had a nice house to sell to get himself somehow out of his debt crisis.
My only observation right now is to think of those right-wing imbeciles who condemned Obama for returning a bust of Winston Churchill to the British government. (It had decorated the office of his predecessor.) Besides being a completely routine thing, Obama's actions would make sense given what Churchill's government had enabled in Kenya.
A friend hepped me to The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. It's about the building of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893; and Larson shows how it was a snap-shot of the times. For instance; the world's first Ferris Wheel was designed for it as US-American engineers' response to the Eiffel Tower that wowed the world at the Paris World's Fair of 1889. Also, while I've read fairly extensively about the Pullman Strike of 1894, I'd never thought about how the drawing of thousands of workers and craftsmen to build the Fair in 1892-93 contributed to the pressures that made the strike such a watershed moment.
And, of course, the book deals with the psychopath H. W. Mudgett/H. H. Holmes; "America's first serial killer" who used the anonymity of Chicago and the millions of visitors to the fair to build a "murder castle" and cruelly murder perhaps 200 people. Larson's handling of this monster is quite affecting.
The way the Fair's organizers and patrons dealt with international global diversity at this time (when all the world's people's were genuinely connected for pretty much the first time) is highly revealing. Fascinating.
The other book I'm reading is Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti by Stan Goff. I found it interesting because my reading about WWII has given me a base to understand the detailed descriptions of military training and procedures that Goff provides. But Haiti is also one of the countries I follow the most. Goff is talking about 1995, when President Bertrand Aristide was being allowed to return to his country with only 1 year left in his term of office, since the pro-Washington military coup ousted him years earlier. Simple reason and morality would have compelled a sane person to say that Aristide's term should continue from where it was interrupted, but US President Clinton was a devious, cynical prick.
Goff is open about the institutional racism of the US Special Forces and it's interesting reading about that after the praise and elevation to hero of the psychotic Chris Kyle ("American Sniper").
The book takes a while to get where it's going, but in the end, you really understand how the US military serves to enforce US foreign policy on the front-lines.
Nothing else to do. I'll post about two books I read.
The first is called Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State by Garry Willis. Willis says that the trappings of the imperial presidency are almost all the fault of the huge increase in power to that office created by and necessitated by nuclear weapons. I share the reviewer's belief that it can't all be blamed on the bomb. Unlike the reviewer, I think it had more to do with taking over international capitalist imperialism than with the pressures of the Cold War.
The other book is Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government. It details how stephen harper has taken advantage of the very wide powers given to Canadian prime ministers as a result of custom and convention, and outlines ways to close these gaps. Considering the subject matter, I found it surprisingly dry. But all the facts are real and important enough.
I just finished reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I thought it was pretty good but I'm not a sciency guy. I'm going to have to re-read the parts on embryology and the whole RNA/DNA/Proteins part again to get a better handle on the ideas. I might not have found it the devastating case for evolution that Dawkins says it is because I'm already onside so there were no thunder-claps of revelation (well, perhaps the part about how there are no kangaroo fossils on the route between the Mount Ararat of Noah's Ark and the Australian continent, or the question of how else to explain the remnants of eyes on deep cave dwelling salamanders would count). Also the evidence of evolution we see before our eyes as in the famous Lenski experiment with E. coliwas pretty good.
Interestingly, I told someone that I was reading it and she said that Buddhists don't believe in evolution. Other creatures might have evolved from more primitive ancestors but humans have always been humans. I said "So much the worse for Buddhism then." She told me that the Buddha knew everything so evolution was wrong and the Buddha was right. The loopiness of religion really hit home at that moment.
The other book (and I've just started it) is Omar Khadr, Oh Canada. I've only just finished the introduction but it already has me livid thinking about the sickening moral failure exhibited by my country. How depressing that values and ethics that should be completely obvious are apparently beyond our reach as a people.
I used to hang around on rabble.ca's "babble" until May, 2006, and, since then, I've been found at www.enmasse.ca and www.breadnroses.ca. Even more lately, I've been at EnMasse, but also numerous blogs from the progressive side.
I'm sometimes rude to people and I've been accused of "schoolyard taunts," so, here's my schoolyard.
