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Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

Started by Thurnez Isa, December 03, 2006, 04:11:35 PM

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Cain

Started Steve Coll's "Directorate S", which I would call "yet another book on the War on Terror and Afghanistan" if it were not from Steve Coll, who actually knows his stuff.

I'm more convinced than ever that our biggest mistake in the War on Terror was not razing the ISI headquarters to the ground and shipping everyone in the so-called Directorate S (the US intel community nickname for the Pakistani infrastructure that supports terrorism and the Taliban) off to Guantanamo for enhanced interrogation.

LMNO

Splitting my time between:

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (about a plausible apocalypse)

Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart (about how scientists don't understand p values)

Making Money by Terry Pratchett (re-reading)

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (a white woman talking about structural white supremacy)

Bioshock: Rapture by John Shirley (suggested by Dok Howl)

Mercy On Me by Reinhard Kleist (graphic novel about Nick Cave)

hooplala

Splitting my time between Farewell My Lovely by Chandler (more racist than I remember most of his novels to be), and Illuminations by Rimbaud. All in all, I prefer Cummings.
"Soon all of us will have special names" — Professor Brian O'Blivion

"Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns." — Bob Dylan?

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman

Cain

Farewell My Lovely is probably his weakest novel IMO, and the racial characterisations in it definitely don't help.  I believe it was originally a mix of a number of earlier unpublished short stories which were subsequently re-edited together, which might explain why the prose felt stilted to me, in comparison with his other novels.

EK WAFFLR

Currently reading
Red Country by Abercrombie, and How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren (reread)

Abercrombie's book is good, but so far, Heroes is the best of the standalone First Law novels.
"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]

Cain

I preferred Best Served Cold, but all 3 are pretty good...arguably better than the original trilogy (which is also still pretty good).

EK WAFFLR

Best served cikd was great too.


I also liked the first book from Luke Scull, Grim Company. Haven't gotten around to read the rest yet.
"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]

EK WAFFLR

Just started "Endurance- Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" by Alfred Lansing

Seems like a fun book.
"At first I lifted weights.  But then I asked myself, 'why not people?'  Now everyone runs for the fjord when they see me."


Horribly Oscillating Assbasket of Deliciousness
[/b]

tyrannosaurus vex

Recently finished "The Science Delusion" by Rupert Sheldrake. Now, before you go all "but that guy's a charlatan and his books ought to be burned" on me, you Fact Nazis, let me explain.

Yes, the guy is probably wrong about everything.

But, I don't care. I will never be pushing the boundaries of science, so it doesn't really matter what I think either way. That fact, plus the fact that I'm, like, colossally tired of living in a boring, mechanistic universe, means I can believe what I want and you can't stop me.

So I choose to live in a universe where science has proven dogs are psychic. There, I said it.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

chaotic neutral observer

Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on September 22, 2018, 12:50:22 AM
But, I don't care. I will never be pushing the boundaries of science, so it doesn't really matter what I think either way. That fact, plus the fact that I'm, like, colossally tired of living in a boring, mechanistic universe, means I can believe what I want and you can't stop me.
The universe I live in is mechanistic, but there are billions of unknown variables and unexpected interactions and undomesticated marketing weasels, so that even though I believe there are Inviolable Rules*, it's still almost impossible to figure out what's going to happen next.

It's not boring, it's terrifying.

Quote
So I choose to live in a universe where science has proven dogs are psychic. There, I said it.
I once thought I had a telepathic link with my intestinal bacteria, but it turned out it was just gas.


*If there weren't Rules, it would be much harder to do physics.
Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.

Cain

Currently reading Rules for Rebels: The Science of Militant Success by Max Abrahms (at the request of the author).

Not going to lie, I like Max.  He's controversial, because he stands against a lot of the conventional wisdom in terrorism studies and is quite outspoken about it, but he's usually got the data to back it up.  In this book, he argues that militant groups only succeed when they avoid civilian casualties, when they have a command structure that not only enforces that targeting but can appropriately deal with elements that choose to do otherwise, and have the marketing/PR skill to condemn those actors while not implicating themselves.

Conversely, terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda and Hamas are never going anywhere, because all they do is attack civilians, which makes any kind of political resolution impossible.  As he quite rightly points out, from a strategic viewpoint terrorism is a failing strategy.  While pundits were claiming ISIS was creating a new state in the Middle East, all they did was unite an alliance against them, which smashed their fake caliphate (which looked impressive on a map, but mostly ruled empty desert and half a dozen key cities) and sent them running.  Even the IRA, who are often seen as a successful terrorist group, completely failed in their aims to reunite Northern Ireland with the rest of the country - the Good Friday agreement and Stormont Assembly was a consolation prize at best.

I do think Max tends to overstate how un-strategic terrorists are (I like to use the concept of bounded rationality here - terrorists do select their targets and go about planning their attacks with a reasonable amount of rational behaviour.  However the larger, strategic behaviour of "how does this actually advance our cause" is often heavily constrained by a number of factors), but given the strangehold that Rational Actor Terrorism Theory has, I can understand why he might feel he has to.

Doktor Howl

Quote from: Cain on October 06, 2018, 02:14:52 PM
Currently reading Rules for Rebels: The Science of Militant Success by Max Abrahms (at the request of the author).

Not going to lie, I like Max.  He's controversial, because he stands against a lot of the conventional wisdom in terrorism studies and is quite outspoken about it, but he's usually got the data to back it up.  In this book, he argues that militant groups only succeed when they avoid civilian casualties, when they have a command structure that not only enforces that targeting but can appropriately deal with elements that choose to do otherwise, and have the marketing/PR skill to condemn those actors while not implicating themselves.

Conversely, terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda and Hamas are never going anywhere, because all they do is attack civilians, which makes any kind of political resolution impossible.  As he quite rightly points out, from a strategic viewpoint terrorism is a failing strategy.  While pundits were claiming ISIS was creating a new state in the Middle East, all they did was unite an alliance against them, which smashed their fake caliphate (which looked impressive on a map, but mostly ruled empty desert and half a dozen key cities) and sent them running.  Even the IRA, who are often seen as a successful terrorist group, completely failed in their aims to reunite Northern Ireland with the rest of the country - the Good Friday agreement and Stormont Assembly was a consolation prize at best.

I do think Max tends to overstate how un-strategic terrorists are (I like to use the concept of bounded rationality here - terrorists do select their targets and go about planning their attacks with a reasonable amount of rational behaviour.  However the larger, strategic behaviour of "how does this actually advance our cause" is often heavily constrained by a number of factors), but given the strangehold that Rational Actor Terrorism Theory has, I can understand why he might feel he has to.

Where can I find this?
Molon Lube

Cain

Oxford Univeristy Press, I got mine via Amazon.

Cain

I've been re-reading the entire Malazan Books of the Fallen series because the news is that Erikson is in the final stages of finishing a new trilogy based on everyone's favourite Conan the Barbarian deconstruction, Karsa Orlong.

Naturally, since this is Erikson, he is of course writing a trilogy about a character who will not appear for one or two books. The prologue also suggests that Karsa Orlong's long term ambition of destroying civilization, all of it, everywhere, may have been put on a hiatus (that or he realised there was no need to push himself, when the rising sea levels will do the work for him).

Nevertheless, I am ready to WITNESS.

Fujikoma

"Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson was REALLY good, hoping there's a sequel, weird as it was.

Cram's thread about spiritual exploration had me thinking of a very entertaining, captivating, and thought provoking piece of webfiction for reasons beyond my understanding. "Unsong", imagine a universe where God is proven to exist, some time in the 1960s when the moon race results in a spacecraft slamming into the machinery that projects the heavens onto the earth, and it all goes downhill from there.

http://unsongbook.com/chapter-1-dark-satanic-mills/