Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

[Junkenstein]

I see. Will have to look more into this in general. The book sounds like it's worth a read too.

How stable was Bennewitz before the fuckery? I'd guess there were already underlying problems and this just helped tip him into full blown crazy?

[Cain]

He wasn't the most stable personality, no.  He was a successful businessman and family man, so he wasn't just some loon gibbering away in a basement somewhere...but when he met and took part in sessions with a supposed abductee, who also wasn't a very stable personality, they sort of entered a shared psychosis - enabled and abetted by the Air Force's own (purposefully) schizophrenic attitude towards him.

That Bill Moore, a noted UFOlogist, was passing on disinformation directly from Air Force intelligence into the community, via Bennewitz, did not help matters.  The Air Force said they wanted the inside scoop on the UFO community and, in return, they'd give Bill the good stuff.  In my opinion, they paid for disinformation with disinformation.  Hence part of the brilliance of the operation.

Also, the story about the Soviet agent in the book is a total rip off of a story about British intelligence in Africa in WWI.  Which itself is probably a rip-off from some awful 1890s pulp-espionage thriller.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

ATS has a (mostly sane) thread about this subject (specifically, UFO mythos as a psyop) with a lot of very good research. It derails in the middle for about three pages when someone gets pissed off that ATSers don't believe that tai chi cures cancer, but it's still worth reading: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread876881/pg1

[Cain]

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[Junkenstein]

How plausible have you found it so far? Seems like some tenuous links but crazier things have been proven, I guess.

[Cain]

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[Junkenstein]

I know rather little about the Unification church, I'll have to look into that. And a shitload of other things. Sounds interesting though, I'll try and grab a copy.

[Kai]

Right now: A paper on silver nanoparticle toxicity and in vitro versus in vivo testing with liver tissue/cells.

Next week it will be my turn to present, a paper on rice stress physiology in relation to salicylic acid production, a topic I know absolutely nothing about, which I will be grilled on after the presentation. This is how PhD level courses seem to work.

[Cain]

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[Kai]

They get so angry they cook themselves.  Trust me, I'm an expert.

Grilled by my own colleagues, I mean, not by faculty. Though, they know if they grill too hard they'll get it back when /they/ present.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I recently finished Blindsight by Peter Watts, which was much better than I expected -- kind of a hard sf run-down of modes of human self-delusion with a basic plotline not entirely unlike a cross between Charlie Stross's Missile Gap and Colin Wilson's Space Vampires. I strongly recommend it.

I also finished The Authoritarians, a social-psychology book by Dr. Robert Altemeyer about authoritarian follower and authoritarian leader personalities. I'm not sure how much respect Altemeyer has in his field; it's a worthwhile book, and his arguments are based on experiment (albeit with smaller sample sizes than would make me comfortable, as someone who is used to sample sizes on the order of ten thousand points) and he clearly understands the statistics; the book is very informal in style, but the substance seems to be backed up by his studies and those of others. However, his is the only perspective I have seen; I have no idea how mainstream his ideas are.

I'm working my way through Colin Wilson's A Criminal History of Mankind, which is interesting despite many flaws. He tries to draw a model of 'the criminal personality', but his source for case studies is back-issues of Detective Magazine (practically a tabloid), his references on animal behavior are pop-science books by Desmond Morris and A.E. Van Vogt, he is under the impression that all psychology is either freudian or adlerian, and he relies heavily on a model of 'hypnosis' that is literally victorian (i.e., he seems unaware of serious, important studies on the subject from the 20th century and appears to accept the ideas about it that were current circa 1890, despite writing this sometime in the 1980s). It's a bit like reading McLuhan, but the writing is more accessible. Nevertheless, some of the ideas are interesting, and in his discussion of what Van Vogt called 'the Right Man' he provides what appears to be a spot-on description of borderline personality disorder.

[Cain]

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[Don Coyote]

I'm reading Consolations of Philosophy. It feels just chock full of the kind of rhetoric that gets used to justify why people without power deserve to be without power, even though I know that is not its intent.

[Cain]

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[Don Coyote]

Well, there is a lot of Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in it.

I find it better to think of the book as an introduction to philosophy and nothing more.

Are we talking about the same book? The one I'm reading was written circa 522 CE. Or is that since I am only passingly familar with Nietzsche and not really at all with Montaigne or Schopenhauer that I am missing some strong connection between them and Boethius?

Horrible thing is that I am reading this as the first book in my class on Medieval Quests, and so far all I can really think of this work is that the prisoner is a whiny child and Philosophy is some agent of the Abrahamic god. And it seems to be just filled with circular reasoning on the nature of Good and God and good and evil.