Here is the most recent nonfiction book I’ve read this year; except for one, all the nf books I’ve read this year are now written up on this site.
This book was published in French in 2005, and in English in 2007, this edition from Arcade Publishing.
This book is by an author discussed in the Stephen Prothero book as being one of the “angry New Atheists” along with American and British writers Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens. Continue reading
Media Matters, Payton Armstrong, 27 April 2022: According to right-wing media, anything that makes them look bad is a “false flag”
Subtitled: “Whether it’s acts of right-wing violence, Russian war crimes, or the January 6 pipe bombs, right-wing media personalities — from the fever swamps to Fox — are quick to suggest they are ‘staged'”
Immediate thought: who would be doing all this staging? Is the entire country of Ukraine “staging” bodies in the streets and manufacturing bombed out apartment complexes? How many people in the US, activated so quickly to stage such an event, would be needed to keep up this fantasy world that the right-wing folks imagine? And all of them keeping it secret, without any leakers to provide any kind of evidence of the staged frauds? But right-wingers obviously do not have a clear grasp of how the world world works; that’s part of their simplistic, white and black, worldview.
This neatly follows up from yesterday’s comments about ideologies. The issue is, why don’t Americans trust experts?. And to cut to the chase, Lewis sees the problems as: people drawing conclusions about the world (including ideologies!) based on anecdotes (personal or on the web); people misunderstanding of statistics and probabilities; and people not interacting with people different from themselves, which might be solved through some kind of encouraged government service for a year at 18 or so. Also: not everyone has a right to an opinion about everything — because most opinions are uninformed. (And yet Americans, in particular, resent being ‘schooled’ by anyone who presumes to know more than they do.)
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Vox, Sean Illing, 24 Apr 2022: Michael Lewis on why Americans don’t trust experts, subtitled, “How a society that is so good at creating knowledge can be so bad at applying it.”
First, two items that follow-up the last item in yesterday’s post. Following, a modern wise one about ideologies.
I didn’t quite finish my write-up of Prothero’s GOD IS NOT ONE yesterday. So a few more comments. With a lagniappe.
Here is a book I’ve mentioned a couple times, having read portions of it over the years since it was published. Only last month did I read it all the way through.
Mixed review. The book makes some excellent points at the start, goes into a great deal of detail, perhaps too much, in the middle, and ends with a sniping chapter in which he is very angry and those he calls the “angry New Atheists.” The last sorta spoils the book. Prothero, I conclude, has faith in faith; it doesn’t matter which faith a person might follow, but a person needs faith. As a way of self-examining the human condition. Not about what’s really true.
Today, another counter-intuitive premise. Before reading the article, I reflect that most people admire celebrity artists, but wouldn’t want their child to try to be one. Other items follow.
Latest in a recurring theme about how Republicans not only aren’t trying to solve real problems, or even fighting the culture wars, they’re fighting *imaginary* problems to rile up their white working class base.
NYT, Paul Krugman, 18 April 2022: Republicans Say, ‘Let Them Eat Hate’
This now 35-year-old book was Dawkins’ third, following the famous The Selfish Gene (summary here) and the less-famous sequel The Extended Phenotype (which I still have not read). If the first two were relatively straightforward explanations of evolution and natural selection (and how the phenotype is more than just the genotype), this third book is one of advocacy. He wants people to understand these basic ideas of evolution, and is frustrated that so many still do not (or deny them).
