(Part 3) Best world history books according to redditors
We found 3,526 Reddit comments discussing the best world history books. We ranked the 1,211 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 41-60. You can also go back to the previous section.
Of some local interest given TheMotte's relation to utilitarians, negative utilitarians in particular:
Quillette, How Anti-Humanism Conquered the Left
> Today is International Workers’ Day, a holiday with socialist origins. Its name hearkens back to a time when the political Left was ostensibly devoted to the cause of human welfare. These days, however, some on the far Left care less about the wellbeing of people than they do about making sure that people are never born at all. How did these radicals come to support a massive reduction in human population, if not humanity’s demise? Whether it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning the morality of childbearing, a birth-strike movement that encourages people to forego parenthood despite the “grief that [they say they] feel as a result,” or political commentator Bill Maher blithely claiming, “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it,” a misanthropic philosophy known as “anti-natalism” is going increasingly mainstream.
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> Recent examples of writings that are warming to the idea of human extinction include the New Yorker’s “The Case for Not Being Born,” NBC News’ “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them,” and the New York Times’ “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” which muses that, “It may well be, then, that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off.” Last month, the progressive magazine FastCompany released a disturbing video entitled, “Why Having Kids Is the Worst Thing You Can Do for the Planet.”
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> Once anti-humanism had infected the environmental movement, it soon spread through the political Left. Robert Zubrin’s book Merchants of Despair gives an overview of the Left’s reversal of its traditional commitment to advancing the human condition, in favor of a project that viewed humanity as a plague upon the Earth:
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>>Instead of The Grapes of Wrath, they carried copies of The Population Bomb … Instead of “Stop the War,” their buttons read “Stop at two” [children]; instead of “Power to the people,” their slogan was “People pollute.”
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>There are some notable environmentalists who recognize the fact that humans are capable of creating abundance instead of scarcity. Environmentalists who take the rational and techno-optimistic view, sometimes called “enlightenment environmentalists” or “ecomodernists,” still believe in humanity’s ability to tackle environmental problems with innovation and ingenuity. Examples include Harvard University’s Steven Pinker and the Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger, who both hold that technologies such as nuclear power can reduce emissions. And the research of Rockefeller University environmental science professor Jesse H. Ausubel, who was integral to setting up the world’s first climate change conference in Geneva in 1979, has shown how technological progress can allow nature to rebound, even while food and other resources have become more plentiful.
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>Unfortunately, ecomodernists are still a minority within the environmental movement. Too many people, mostly on the political Left, still agree with Ehrlich that humans are analogous to cancer cells and long for the reduction or even extinction of our species. One third of Americans in the millennial generation say they are deeply concerned about the environmental impact of having children. Not that long ago, well within the living memory of a millennial such as myself, a 2002 episode of Aaron Sorkin’s popular political drama The West Wing could still quip that “Death is bad” remained a left-wing position. The scriptwriter took it for granted that, on the political Left, everyone is in favor of human flourishing. If only that were still the case.
Interesting article, but I'd question the premise: just how widespread is this kind of thought? I note that they do not cite statistics other than VHEMT's facebook page having gotten 2000 likes in 5 months, which does not exactly imply a viral hit. I have little doubt this philosophy is more popular on the (new) left than on the right, but that's such a broad tent it's hard to treat the left as being "consumed" by it except for a few small or fringey subcultures.
However, what's also interesting and I wish they'd addressed it, telling people with already-low birth rates receives little pushback, other than this Quillette article, when it happens in the New Yorker or the NYT's opinion page, apparently. But compare to the reaction to Vox's Bill Gates interview where he suggested a region with especially high birth rates cut back a bit.
PS: This has been commented on previously, but I still find it interesting that people that care very (perhaps too) deeply about human suffering (negative utilitarians) and people that care not a whit about humanity's existence (I assume many eco-nihilists or whatever you'd like to call VHEMT) find the same conclusion of "end it all."
Today's youth in American are going to be the catalyst for a global revolution in the coming 25-50 years. This is the beginning thread. The growing economic woes for the young will push them in the direction of revolt. The Internet will play a central role, allowing for the massive communication and organization of these people. It will be revolt of the Digital Natives vs the Immigrants.
The reasoning for the revolution is the ending of the capitalist world-system. The global revolution of 1968 started the transition period, and were still in the thralls of that transition. Read Immaneul Wallerstein's World-System Analysis: An Introduction for more on this. It will blow your mind.
Here it is.
Rule by Secrecy
Please ignore idiots like that, they appeal to fear because they have no recourse to reason, fear is one of the lowest most primal human emotions. They are idiots.
Check out Sherif Gaber on Youtube and Masked Arab.
I'd also like to recommend you this book "
https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-History-Humankind-Yuval-Harari/dp/077103850X
Ah, you beat me to sharing this by a few minutes. I've deleted my top-level post, but I'll keep it as a comment here, because my reaction was opposite to yours.
A fun interview to take you into the weekend: "[UK interviewer] Andrew Neil DESTROYS Ben Shapiro!" Lest you're thinking that quote is too boo-outgroup...
Shapiro was the one who tweeted it.
I'll cop to my bias prior to writing this. I've been hoping to see someone else post this, because Ben Shapiro is not my favorite, and this interview really doesn't present him at his best. I find myself enjoying this a bit too much to really be a credible neutral source, but I'll take a shot at summarizing nonetheless.
I had no idea who Andrew Neil was prior to this. Some context I have since heard: he is one of the leading conservative commentators in the UK, previously working under Rupert Murdoch and writing for the Daily Mail, currently chairman of a media group that runs some of the most influential center-right media in the UK. He's provided some passionate commentary in defense of western values, and is famous for hard-hitting interviews with a wide range of people. A great moment between him and Alex Jones: "This is half past eleven. You're watching the Sunday Politics. We have an idiot on the program today."
So what happened? This is one of the only times I'll actually encourage watching the video over reading a summary, because it's fast-paced and frankly pretty entertaining. Neil comes into the interview pretty aggressively, pushing back against a lot of Shapiro's positions and focusing especially on the contrast between Shapiro's commentary about the ways discourse is being degraded and the ways Shapiro himself degrades discourse at times. Shapiro responds largely by firing off questions and accusations about Neil's motives.
A couple of highlights:
All told, it's a pretty fascinating crossover between American and British politics, and probably not Shapiro's finest moment.
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That was my top-level comment. I'll take a moment to respond to your main question as well: Why throw old things at him? Because the UK isn't as familiar with him as the US, and snark is still a huge part of his brand. I'm fully and deeply on board with the message that there's too much hate in politics, but even as he writes condemnations of that hate, I see Shapiro as a vector for and intensifier of it. The video titles above are a good example, alongside his pinned tweet ("Facts don't care about your feelings"), his comments in the interview... this sort of combativeness is a huge part of his brand. If he's approaching things from that combative of an angle, I expect to see him prepared with thoughtful responses to combativeness directed at him. He didn't do that here.
My God, those article comments are cancer. Complete misunderstanding of how supply and demand work. This is an excellent article.
​
Very glad to see the Edward Glaeser quote, his book "Triumph of the City" is an absolute must read for any urbanist.
The comment I see is invoking the failure of dirigisme in Brazil. There is a point to be made about the shortcomings of dependency theory as formulated by Cardoso & Faletto and Gunder-Frank... to the extent that Import Substitution Industrialization did not (on its own) move Southern-Cone countries up the international value production chain. It should be noted that Wallerstein's formulation of world systems analysis and contributions to development theory and macrosociology go far beyond that of unequal trade. With regard to the question of unequal trade and comparative advantage one ought to go right back to Marx' Capital and Smith's Wealth of Nations: the terms of trade in the market are completely commensurate - there is no such thing as exploitation or unequal exchange at the point of exchange. This is not Wallerstein's argument. Wallerstein performs an analysis of the political economy of production across value chains. His argument is that the lower on the value chain a country is located, the less the labor of its workers is valued, which is born out in the comparison of wages of skilled vs. unskilled labor. This, in turn, determines the relative benefit a country will reap in dealings with others. With regard to the effectiveness of this sort of analysis as applied to economic development, consider the works of Robert Wade and Alice Amsden. They argue that state policies aimed at moving a country's economic base up the international value chain have been crucial in the successes of East Asian Economies. Wade and Amsden are not specifically world systems theorists, but their work helps to reinforce some assumptions in the approach. As for general arguments against World Systems Analysis, you would have to be more specific, as it is a holistic approach to social science.
It’s crazy to think about, but during the dawn of mankind (a couple hundred thousand years ago) there were actually several sapient species on Earth at the same time.
Homosapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and a handful of others all lived on the Earth together. There’s a lot of evidence of them intermingling, socializing, and mating with one another. Some of these species didn’t die out until relatively recently (30,000 years ago). There were also notable physical differences between them, such as Neanderthals being significantly stronger and more robust (and contrary to popular belief, equally or more intelligent) than their Homosapien counterparts.
No one is entirely sure why, but our species ended up dominating and the others went extinct. The theory I personally believe is most likely is a combination of two:
If stuff like this interests you, I strongly recommend the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
Some more fun facts:
Humans are able to throw projectiles farther and with more power than any other animal on Earth due to our superior balance.
Humans are better at stamina running than any other land animal due to our unique ability to regenerate stamina while running (because of our high concentration of sweat glands). In fact, some ancient African hunting techniques involved chasing after prey for over 15 miles until they collapsed from exhaustion.
I think this is the tragedy of our times. Instead of arguing about the solutions from an ideological view point, we argue about the science. Chris Mooney, at the Washington Post, wrote an interesting book about the subject that came out in 2005, The Republican War on Science. It is well worth reading:
https://www.amazon.com/Republican-War-Science-Chris-Mooney/dp/0465046762
And this even goes further back as you can see if you listen to Erik Conway's lecture on the "Merchants of Doubt: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV6A4CZkOXg&t=186s
Don’t know if this was a troll but it says in “Sociology and Religion” now.
https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/tiny-houses
>It ignores the real reason that housing is unaffordable — at least in the coastal urban centers where fantasies of tiny housing are most potent. The problem, simply put, is that 1) land in cities where you'd want to live is expensive and 2) many cities don't let developers use that land efficiently.
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>The growth of tiny houses has been held back considerably because there's just nowhere to put them. That's partially due to minimum house size zoning regulations, and partially due to bans on "camping" on otherwise unoccupied land or the driveway/parking space of an existing house, like one recently adopted in DC. But even the most tiny-house-friendly zoning code in the world wouldn't necessarily render tiny houses viable.
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>Suppose it suddenly became legal to just park a tiny house in an ordinary parking space indefinitely and live there. This might work for people with friends willing to spot them a space. But if you actually need to buy the land you're parked on, well, that becomes tricky.
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>Here in DC, you can get a $35,000 parking space in Columbia Heights or a $20,000 one in Petworth. Back in 2011, there was one in the Dupont Circle neighborhood selling for $100,000.
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>The situation's the same in other high-priced coastal cities. According to the Wall Street Journal's Candace Jackson, prime San Francisco neighborhoods feature parking spaces costing as much as $125,000, and there are several $1 million spots in New York City.
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>The point is simple: What you're paying for in high-productivity, desirable cities like San Francisco, New York, and DC is the location. That is, the proximity to other workers, which enhances all of your productivity and leads to these areas' high incomes relative to the rest of the country.
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>You're not paying for your overlarge apartments. No one in these cities is overwhelmed by how gigantic all their housing options are.
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>Construction is the cheap part. Land is the expensive part.
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>And not only do tiny houses not make land cheaper, they're a really inefficient use of it. If you have a given piece of land and want to produce the most affordable housing possible out of it, you don't stick a tiny house on there. You build a many-stories-tall residential skyscraper with hundreds of apartments inside it.
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>The answer is density, which tiny houses don't help. As Arielle Milkman notes in her excellent assessment of tiny houses in Jacobin magazine, "Tiny houses generally do nothing to increase urban density in cities like Washington, DC, which is already concentrated with people and has little open space."
Probably the most well-known example of recent and ongoing human evolution is lactase persistence (aka lactose tolerance). Ordinarily humans lose the ability to digest lactose fairly soon after being weaned. However, among populations of pastoralists more than once a beneficial mutation has appeared and spread that conferred the ability to digest lactose throughout adulthood. But there are still large human populations (most notably East Asians) for whom lactose intolerance is still the norm.
For more on this, and other topics related to your question, I highly recommend The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802867618/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Y8jRDb10R02NG
>PROTIP: He's not a moderate Muslim.
Yes he is. Grab a copy of Harris' The End of Faith and check it out. He explains quite well how our definition of "moderate" simply does not exist in Islam.
The democrats are soft and they refuse to acknowledge the kind of people they are opposed to. The whole "they go low, we go high!" thing was the most naive shit I ever heard in my life. And the Clinton campaign kept using it in response to Trump's demagoguery.
What they failed to understand is that your average American is an emotionally driven, subservient, sheeplike, cretin. They go by the balls, not the brains. If you don't believe me just watch Fox or listen to talk radio for five minutes. They don't deal in "facts", they deal in emotional catharsis, anger, horror. That's why it's effective. More than that the GOP strategy revolves around loading liberal rhetoric with emotional/racist detritus that works on a subconscious level more than a rational one. If you want a great explanation of all this then this and this are both great books. I'd highly recommend this also.
Whenever I hear a democrat say "I'll reach across the aisle!" I cringe. Tell me, who does that inspire? Why vote for you just so you can bend over backwards for people you hate? Bernie Sanders did as good as he did not because of policy specifics but because he knew how to capitalize on people's legitimate anger. Trump capitalized on racism. Bernie Sanders capitalized on the very obvious inequality and institutional crony capitalism that defines our government. One appealed to the worst in people, the other reminded people of how much they're getting screwed.
And that's the problem with democrats: they're stuck thinking in terms of political compromise, of moderation, of political correctness.
The most intelligent thing to come out of a democratic politician's mouth recently was when Perez said in public that republicans "don't give a shit about people". That's both true and sensationalist enough to make an impact.
You don't need to tell lies. You need to tell the truth so bluntly, brutally, and without any sort of veneer of compromise or civility. You need to be willing to look the entire GOP in the face and describe it as a corrupt octopus that is a threat to fucking civilization. You need to weigh down their language with subliminal associations with nazis marching down the street and mass slaughter of minorities.
Democrats need to stop treating republicans like people with good intentions and treat them as a fucking threat to our democracy. Then their base will get out and vote, then the spotlight will be shone brightly in the faces of the fucking dickheads. They need to attack, constantly. Instead they sit around defending.
The republicans offer nothing of substance. They do not treat political campaigns as debates but as a kind of mental warzone. The democrats try to appeal to people's better nature. People don't have a better nature, people are cynical shitheads. Roger Stone gets that.
Jim Marrs made me want to be a Freemason. I'm not joking. He wrote a book called "Rule by Secrecy" (find it here)alleging to trace all the major conspiracy theories in modern America back to their roots (spoiler alert: it's aliens.)
I read the book in college, out of skeptical curiosity (spoiler alert: it didn't convince me) and he has an entire section about the Freemasons. He described the beliefs of the Freemasons- Universality, equality for all, the tolerance of all faiths and beliefs, the imposition of a global single government (the "one world government")- and the ushering in of a "new world order" of unified humanity.
It was supposed to be sensationalist, alarmist, and get you totally against the Freemasons. I read it and said "huh, this all sounds pretty great. I can get behind these ideals."
George Washington. Ben Franklin. Teddy Roosevelt. Two of my Great-Grand fathers. My Grand-father. And countless other smart, admirable, and worthy men.
They all knew something. I wanted to know it too.
And, now I do, and I also learned that Jim Marrs doesn't know shit.
Man I usually agree with you on this sub but you're so far off base here
/u/BostonBiked is right with the regards to Jaywalking. It was a term invented by the auto industry to sell more cars. As was the massive purchase and further retirement of trolleys by General Motors in the 30s. These things aren't conspiracy theories.
S/he's also correct about AAA lobbying against bike infrastucture. They paint it as a "war on cars." Look what happened in DC a few years ago. Look at any article about putting bike lanes in the roads.
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/16571/war-on-cars-hasnt-died-as-aaa-knocks-l-st-bike-lane/
>Go to a BRA meeting where an Article 80 project is being proposed, and watch how the developers get hosed building bike paths and bike rooms and bike racks and locks.
Hosed? Really? Hanging bike racks in huge multi-million dollar buildings makes developers hosed?
I think the backasswards requirement (that I believe has since been lightened?) that required parking for residential buildings is hosing developers. Parking lots are, uneconomic and a massive waste of resources.
Cars are part of every day life. That's fine. In many instances, for better or for worse, they're necessary in the country... but not as much in cities. Boston is a city and in a city you do not need one car per person. That's the beauty of a city.
Read:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0049U4HTW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1
>The research is actually more complicated than that. Research shows that religious people are NOT more happy. However, people who report having friends in church are more happy. (I believe some of that research is here- https://www.amazon.com/American-Grace-Religion-Divides-Unites/dp/1416566732 ) So the intervening variable appears to be connections at church, not a feature of religion/non-religion. (Non-believers who report having friends at church are just as happy, strong believers who do not report so are no more happy).
​
That's definitely a failure of your school system, though I'm not going to comment on Georgia's in general since I know nothing about it. I'm a former teacher who's had experience in several school districts, and all of them required a basic world history course that heavily covered Europe. Heck, when I was in school we covered European geography and history in 5th grade, then again in middle school, and again in high school.
Sounds like you got robbed. Luckily, there's lots of great books out there you can use to catch yourself up if you care to, and some of them are free. (I tried to only highlight affordable ones, but libraries are a great resource too!)
The Ashkenazim supposedly have an average IQ a standard deviation above the norm. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending claim that this is because among the Ashkenazim only those who excelled in banking and trade thrived the last 1000 years of pogroms, having 5 times as many children as Ashkenazim working in unrelated fields. As you can imagine their claims are controversial though.
I'm on a similar side, my parent's are not technically atheists, but they just don't care and my dad openly mocks me for going to church. I also don't like going to church, because the Catholic Church is kinda corrupt in my opinion. I'd suggest finding an academic bible-study meetings, I've been invited to one community and I was blown away how warm and intelligent those people were, also very decisive about making a positive change in the world and in themselves.
When it comes to doubts, I get them aswell. What works for me is to look at the theories that don't say - "God exist, therefore His commandments work", but "God's commandments work, therefore there is something transcendent behind them".
Nice fuel for thought on the Old Testament - also the new Shapiro's book seem to be on a similar page. I didn't read it yet, but I've seen a lot of interviews with him where he states that judeo-christian values are what made the Western society far better than it is. Speaking from a Polish perspective, my nation was literally supported by God with overthrowing russian communist rule and becoming independent.
That's an excellent argument there sparky.
Bush administrations' attacks on the integrity of science information" listing examples that include some of those mentioned by Oreskes and "undercutting the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, and stacking agencies and advisory committees with unqualified ideologues." Stebbins credits the book with providing context by detailing the tactics employed by "conservative Republicans" and establishing the roots of these undercutting techniques with examples from the last 40 years.
The Republican War on science Read the book, follow up the citations and educate yourself.
I'm reading a book called The Case for God that claims religion was largely understood in mythical terms when stories like that were written. That is to say, nobody thought they were supposed to be taken literally. Instead, they would understand religious stories to carry a higher truth in the form of imagery and symbolism that could be understood on a deeper level, like a piece of art.
Just a thought.
I've become predictable!
If you want to dig into the concept a bit more, I highly recommend "How (Not) to be Secular." Definitely not our term.
> the ease with which populist rhetoric can manipulate our emotions is absolutely terrifying to me
Then you should be terrified by everything which has popular appeal, right now. Especially Christians and their rhetoric over 377A when they wield sloppy reasoning. Don't pretend it doesn't already exist here.
>different chauvinisms appeal to us at some level - sexism, racism, nationalism, religious biases. All throughout history time and time again these -isms have vaulted the corrupt to power, thrust into powerful positions by the masses
You're heaping scorn on the symptoms while pointedly ignoring the cause of the disease.
In The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama lays out the three pillars of a stable state: state-building, rule of law and accountable government. If people feel that either pillars are broken, or not working for them they will reach for an excuse for rabble-rousing. People have good reason to feel dissatisfied if they're just being ordered around without being represented. It's just human nature, and to rail against it is as silly as getting angry with a cat for killing birds.
Just as proper measures should have been taken to prevent the cat from even coming close to birds in the first place, the real problem lies with an unchecked self-serving political class and/or business elite who neglect their noblesse oblige. Gone are the days of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Tan Tock Seng, Tan Kah Kee, Teresa Hsu and Khoo Teck Puat. Also gone are the days of our 1G Cabinet and instead we have absentee MPs and Ministers who spend much of their time justifying their salaries. Those are the people who are causing the disease which results in the symptoms of populism.
People who feel satisfied with their lives do not bother to share Temasek Review posts, let alone read its contents. Or InfoWars for that matter. Censoring those kind of platforms and pretending those opinions shouldn't exist does not fix the problem because their audience still have good reasons to feel dissatisfied with their lot in life.
"...in the last 50-100k years"
Make that the last couple of thousand years. Specifically the Ashkenazi Jews seem to have evolved higher than average intelligence because of cultural and sociological factors.
http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465002218
I didn't provide anything because you don't even know what a fact is. But if you are actually interested, first you need to understand what the purpose of cities is to begin with. Start here:
https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier-ebook/dp/B0049U4HTW
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=order+without+design&i=digital-text&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities-ebook/dp/B01HWKSBDI/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=cities+jane&qid=1563038376&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
Then you'll start to understand why urban areas have distinctly different issues as other places, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing.
Version 2 sounds a lot like The Gods of Eden
I think everyone should read The Republican War on Science. It was so frigging depressing I couldn't finish the book.
Because no one has said it yet, The Evolution of God by Robert Wright (http://www.amazon.com/The-Evolution-God-Robert-Wright/dp/0316734918) is a great book that covers this topic thoroughly.
Personal research, mostly. I'm a big history nerd with a slant toward religion and other macabre subject matter. I'm actually not as well read as I'd like to be on these subjects, and I basically blend different sources into a knowledge smoothie and pour it out onto a page and see what works for me and what doesn't.
I'll list a few books I've read that I enjoyed. There are certainly more here and there, but these are the "big ones" I was citing when writing all the comments in this thread. I typically know more about Christianity than the other major faiths because of the culture around me.
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years - Diarmaid MacCulloch
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Karen Armstrong
The next two balance each other out quite well. Hardline anti-theism contrasted with "You know, maybe we can make this work".
The Case for God - Karen Armstrong
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Lately, I have been reading the Stoics, which like Buddhism, I find to be one of the more personally palatable philosophies of mind I have come across, although I find rational contemplation a bit more accessible to my Westernized nature.
Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters - Translated by Moses Hadas
Discourses and Selected Writings (of Epictetus) - Translated by Robert Dobbin
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius - Translated by George Long
I'm still waiting on Fed Ex to deliver this one:
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine
Also, if you're into history in general, a nice primer for what sorts of things to dive into when poking around history is this fun series on YouTube. I usually watch a video then spend a while reading more in depth about whatever subject is covered that week in order to fill the gaps. Plus, John and Hank are super awesome. The writing is superb and I think, most importantly, he presents an overall argument for why studying history is so important because of its relevance to current events.
Crash Course: World History - John Green
for an overview of what it presents, go here. Video version. Basically the concept of Yaheweh evolved over about 6 centuries out of the old caananite pantheon, which included el, ashera (el's lover) and baal. Due to a combination of xeonphobia (thanks to being invaded over and over) and political unrest, certain prophets were given sounding boxes more than others, while other prophets were silenced.
Editors and redactors then went in and changed certain historical details or laws present in the torah and history books (see my previous post on Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2), king Josiah 'discovered' the book of deuteronomy (read: wrote a new set of more-totalitarian laws to unite the kingdom), and created stories and myths that made it seem like Israel's biggest problem was always turning to false gods, away from Yahweh (who merged personalities with El), the war god.
another good read that is the archaeological parallel to the karen armstrong book is "The Bible Unearthed" by Finklestein. It points out the archaeological findings of the transformation from polytheism, to monolateralism (belief in multiple gods but showing preference to one), to monotheism. It also points out the fact that there is no credible evidence for a large portion of the 'history' in the bible, such as the exodus, the wandering in the desert, the mass genocides; "Israel" was a people group that was already there, and just gained a new national identify thanks to very creative myth-weavers.
Finally, I'm currently reading "The Evolution of God" by Robert Wright (a journalist) who pulls together and condenses a lot of this information into one. He's an expert at literature surveying and information condensing.
shhhh
This is a great book
Steve Bannon is part of a long line of reactionary nitwits
No surprise. This is from 2006 The Republican War on Science
>You'll need to think of a better ad hominem.
I addressed the position you've taken and the reasons why you see things that way. If you found that offensive, i'm sorry but that is a personal problem. Insulting you was not the point or the totality of what i said.
>And you probably think NYT is unbiased also.
Strawman
>"conservative christian right" hasn't been a boogey man since 1997
Are you serious? Have you watched any of the red debates? Its like 90% theocrats.
Since Nixon/Reagan and the merging of religion and politics the right has gone so much further right and into science and fact denial that it's ridiculous to anyone that isn't brainwashed by it, and repeatedly told to dismiss any dissenting information on any desperate and falsified grounds they can find
Id like to give you some homework.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Republican-Science-Chris-Mooney/dp/0465046762
http://www.amazon.com/The-Republican-Brain-Science-Science/dp/1118094514
The first is more about ideological factors driving the detachments from reality
The second is more about psychological factors driving those same detachments.
"Reality has a well known 'liberal bias' " - Stephen Colbert
My top recommendation is Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation by Allen and Swain. If you haven't read it please do. It's not the easiest read, but well worth the effort.
A close second is Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ by Todd Billings. If you or a loved one are suffering, read this right away. If not, read it anyway for when the time comes.
A few more that I have on my list to read, but have not yet read:
Seems-hotter-than-it-actually-is take: suburbs are bad policy
I agree with a lot of what /u/Diet_Victreebel wrote. The idea that "belief" is solely a head-based, intellectual exercise is actually quite new and shaped by Western cultural thinking. These days I understand faith more in the sense of trust. For example, believing that a Ferris wheel is operating under a set of mechanics that will support its structure is different than trusting in those mechanics enough to step inside it and go around. The book How (Not) to be Secular has helped me understand how we have come to understand belief in its modern sense, and how we can conceive of other possibilities. I don't always agree with the author but I highly recommend it.
They don't have anything to do with Canadian politics specifically but two very interesting books that I just finished.
Diamond's new book has opened my eyes on the value which traditional societies can provide to modern one's today. A really thought provoking book. Fukuyama is one of my most trusted authors on topics including sociology and historical development, the book focuses on political institutions and their development specifically through China and the Middle East (because that was where it all started).
The hypothesis of this book is that human beings have evolved more in the past 10,000 years than in any other period of the development of man. It's interesting that you picked that exact time frame.
A good place to start I think is reading Shamanic Voices by anthropoligist Joan Halifax. It isn't a how-to guide or anything, but gives intimate accounts of Shamanic practices throughout the world. It includes records of rituals performed by Maria Sabina that you may find especially interesting.
After that, I'd recommend Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by reliigious history professor Mircea Eliade. Its a bit thick but is very thorough in its treatment of Shamanic practices through the millennia and around the world, including descriptions of numerous techniques used for entering trance states, cosmologies, symbolism, initiations, and powers claimed by Shamans. This is an academic work, however and won't give you step by step instructions (if that is what you are looking for).
If you are looking for something a bit lighter, Supernatural by Graham Hancock is an interesting read. In it he looks at parallels between drug-induced experiences, Shamanism, fairies, and reports of extraterrestrials. If I had known that last part before I read it I probably would have skipped this book but he actually made some very interesting points that I think makes the book worth reading. Also, he relies heavily on Joan Halifax's book as a source and spends a decent amount of time discussing Maria Sabina and psilocybin usage.
The beginner how-to department is an area I'm less versed in but I've heard good things about this book and its companion. Personally I'd generally recommend getting oneself intimately familiar with current and past Shamanic practices through the academic works on the subject and then creating a personalized system - though commercial how-to guides can certainly provide some practical hints and inspiration.
It’s not post modern at all :) it’s incredibly relevant and contemporary primatology, as well as some philosophy especially in the realm of ethics. There’s some wonderful books on the this and I’ll list the links for them if you ever want to check them out
In the Shadow of Man (1971) this one is a bit old but incredible considering it was one of the first accounts of primate behaviour so accurate.
Sapiens (2014) now this book is an incredible read if you want a brief , easy and wonderful account of humans over our evolution. And what makes us “different.”
Primates and Philosophers (2006)
A personal favourite of mine, an excellent account at how something as “human” as morality is something perhaps shared amongst at least some great apes
The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary(2005)
And a rather analytical text, tracing the interpretation of the human-like great apes and ape-like earliest ancestors of present-day humans, this study demonstrates how from the days of Linnaeus to the present, the sacred and taboo-ridden animal-human boundary was constantly tested. The unique dignity of humans, a central value in the West, was, and to some extent still is, on the minds of taxonomists, ethnologists, primatologists, and archaeologists. This book thus offers an anthropological analysis of the burgeoning anthropological disciplines in terms of their own cultural taboos and philosophical preconceptions.
I'm in the middle of Homo Deus currently. Its great so far, Yuval is a great writer and his books are a lot more accessible than traditional history books. I'm sure there are a lot of liberties taken with some of the history but I think Sapiens is a must-read. Homo Deus is more assumption based on current reality but its very interesting so far.
Gulag Archipelago is one I read based on the recommendation of Jordan Peterson. Awesome book if you are into WW1-WW2 era eastern europe. being an eastern european myself, i devour everything related to it so this book tickled my fancy quite a bit. good look into the pitfalls of what peterson warns against.
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning is another history book discussing that time period and how it all transpired and the lesser known reasons why WW2 went down the way it did. some surprising stuff in that book related to hitler modeling europe around how the united states was designed at the time.
apologies for inundating with the same topic for all my books so far but Ordinary Men is an amazing book chronicling the people that carried out most of the killings during WW2 in Poland, Germany and surrounding areas. The crux of the argument which I have read in many other books is that Auschwitz is a neat little box everyone can picture in their head and assign blame to when in reality most people killed during that time were taken to the outskirts of their town and shot in plain sight by fellow townspeople, mostly retired police officers and soldiers no longer able for active duty.
for some lighter reading i really enjoy jon ronson's books and i've read all of them. standouts are So You've Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test. Highly recommend Them as well which has an early Alex Jones cameo in it.
An interesting read is the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Some important philosophical views are presented about life and death.
https://www.amazon.com/Tibetan-Book-Dead-Liberation-Understanding/dp/0553370901
Robert Zubrin's book, Merchants of Despair is excellent on this.
Try reading Merchants of Despair. I think it's right up your alley.
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Despair-Environmentalists-Pseudo-Scientists-Antihumanism/dp/159403737X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=merchants+of+despair&qid=1549985115&s=gateway&sr=8-1
Eliade e omul care a adus shamanismul si ezoterismul estic in cercul filozofilor occidentali. Este puternic subestimat omul asta, ce-a facut, ce-a scris si chiar profunzimea micilor povestiri.
Asta am auzit ca-i deosebit de interesanta: http://www.amazon.com/Shamanism-Archaic-Techniques-Ecstasy-Bollingen/dp/0691119422
You are correct that many Christians take offense, and of course they do. Their fundamental sense of self is rooted in belief. However, the atheist is no different. You yourself indicated this with the last line of your post. When one's paradigm is challenged, it is normal for those who are not used to dialogue with other paradigms to lash out like white blood cells attacking a foreign body in the bloodstream. At the very least, if you're looking for academic dialogue about Christianity, you'll need to stop going to non-academic Christians. The examples of Trump representing (and in my opinion, "Christian" Trump supporters) true orthodox (correct) theology is simply false, along with any Christian institution that "bears fruit" of violence, etc.
As an aside, I also picked up a small but strong presupposition common among many atheists/agnostics (assuming atheism/ag from your post, correct if wrong) that the book is closed academically on the existence of God. I would assume that you're aware that at the most basic level, the belief in or not in God is indeed still a belief and can never be proven; this is much more problematic for the positivist than the believer. Fortunately for us all, the metamodern landscape has resulted in the contesting of all things secular and religious. There is no longer (nor ever was) a separation.
I would recommend these books to you for some further reading on the point: #1 and #2. Here are to qualifying reviews on the first text. 1 and 2.
Hope it helps.
Only oblique references to reincarnation were left in the New Testament (such as the question about the man born blind, in which the questioner seems to assume the man could have done something in a past life that would warrant that type of punishment, though it's not directly stated).
Some people believe that all direct references were expunged by the early church fathers (who, you must remember, were also political leaders - no separation of church and state back then) because they felt that if a person believed that the current lifetime was just one of many, then they would not be as afraid of any punishments that church or king might mete out. And later on it was at odds with the church's take on hell (which doesn't hold up once you realize that three completely different words in the original languages were all translated "hell" in English, one of them being the place that all dead go to (probably the place we rest between lives) and another being the eternal place of confinement and torture that was reserved for the devil and the fallen angels, but not humans. And in case you were wondering, the third was a actual garbage dump in Jerusalem where fires were always burning to consume the trash, sort of like the municipal dumps we used to have in the 1950's and before, and maybe still have in some very rural areas and in third world countries).
I would suggest if you are not terribly uncomfortable with the thought that extraterrestrials may have influenced our history, see if your local library or your favorite bookseller has a copy of "The Gods of Eden" by William Bramley (Amazon link). I think you would find it a very interesting read, even if you don't completely buy into the author's hypothesis, and it might offer answers to some of your questions.
Thanks for your kind words. I started having these thoughts back in my early college days when I was majoring in econ. I found it odd how the theories I was being taught were so simple and clear, yet there was so much political disagreement. I thought, "Why is there so much argument over what to do when the answers are so obvious!?"
Then I started actually reading history and realized that things were not nearly so simple. That economics as it was taught to me is simplified and censored to the point of having almost no relationship to the real world. I eventually stumbled upon political economist Karl Polanyi's classic The Great Transformation and his concept of fictitious commodities, and that broke the dam/blew my mind.
Once I got into science, I found it very telling how all the economists and business people I had met were much more confident in their theories of the world than the chemists and biologists I was working with, despite the fact that the latter had much more solid empirical ground to stand on. That's the effect of ideology, I guess; you don't question it or even realize it is there.
If you are interested in these topics, I would recommend:
the aforementioned Polanyi book
Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
This long academic paper by law professors Jon Hanson & David Yosifon
And some essays by Pierre Bourdieu, such as Social Scientists, Economic Science and the Social Movement and Neoliberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited Exploitation, which can be found in Sociology is a Martial Art
A quick Google or wikipedia search will reveal these authors' backgrounds and any possible biases they may have in your view. It is fun to see a founder of neoconservatism (Fukuyama) and an anarchist anthropologist who helped start Occupy Wall Street (Graeber) essentially agree on the total historical inaccuracy of modern economic thought and the corrosive impact of economics on the other social sciences.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Evolution-God-Robert-Wright/dp/0316734918
The book I linked explores that possibility. Some of the things the author goes into is how Yahweh started as simply one god in a large pantheon, and then the Jews started to worship him more than the other gods (the other gods still being recognized and significant) until the Jews turned to monotheism. Fascinating book.
http://www.amazon.com/End-Faith-Religion-Terror-Future/dp/0393035158
Why would you steal from someone who's work you enjoy?
Well, for starters I'd check out E.E. Evans-Pritchard's Theories of Primitive Religion, which summarizes most the reasons for the modern break with Dennett's sources in classical anthropology and sociology. The only edition currently in print is pretty expensive, so it's probably best to look for a library copy.
The direction more recent scholarship points towards is a modern status quo that offers no definitive set of theories as to the origins of religion, which is perhaps part of why Dennett and co. have been so eager to revive the Victorian models.
In the meantime, Dennett is explicit in rejecting more recent historians of religion, like [Mircea Eliade][1]. I wouldn't necessarily recommend Eliade as an authoritative source on the origins of religion -- he provides some very interesting research and synthesis, but is, on the whole, too interpretive -- yet it's telling that Dennett is willing to reject a major modern theorist without offering anyone to stand in his stead.
Increasingly, serious researchers have tended towards specialization, so it's difficult to give you a list of authors that deal with the phenomenon of religion as a whole. For the history of the Christian tradition, I'd recommend [Elaine Pagels][2] and [Jaroslav Pelikan][3]. For the Judaic tradition, and particular Jewish mysticism, [Gershom Scholem][4] -- who also makes some very interesting observations on the relationship between religious experience and religious tradition in general, cf. "Religious authority and mysticism". On ancient Greek religion, I'd suggest [Karl Kerenyi][5], [Walter Burkert][7], [Martin P. Nilsson][8], and E.R. Dodds' [The Greeks and the Irrational][6]. Eliade is, on the whole, as strong an authority as you will find on the general topic of Shamanism, and his book takes us a good ways back towards he earliest forms of religion presently known.
That's a pretty good start, anyway.
I should say that there's nothing necessarily wrong with most of the modern research Dennett presents in Breaking the Spell. The problem is that, despite his protestations to the contrary, they seem to have been chosen with a particular interpretive paradigm in mind.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Pagels
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaroslav_Pelikan
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gershom_Scholem
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ker%C3%A9nyi
[6]: http://www.amazon.com/Greeks-Irrational-Sather-Classical-Lectures/dp/0520242300/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249408287&sr=8-1
[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Burkert
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_P._Nilsson
Everybody in this post needs to read The Evolution of God by [Robert Wright](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wright_(journalist). It's the tale of the evolution of Judaic religion from polytheism through monolatry to monotheism, the evidence for this theological evolution that still exists in the Bible and from archaeology, and so on. For anyone wanting actual non-circular references for their positions. As I recall, all archaeological evidence points to the Israelite culture and kingdoms evolving in Israel, not from somewhere else.
Inb4 it's some anti-Semitic work, because it's not.
edit: a link.
Another contemporary source that could be useful is "American Grace: How Religion Unites Us and Divides Us." I read it for a Politics of Religion class (not Soc specifically) but it was a good book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1416566732/ref=redir_mdp_mobile
I'd recommend you read Yuval Noah Harari's, "Sapiens." It's a great perspective on where we came from and how we got here and whether or not we're better off. It may help you put your observations in context better.
In India it's not uncommon for older, upper-caste men to quit everything and take to the Himalayas to live out their lives in prayer, meditation, and reflection - living entirely on charity. I've met some of these guys in Rishikesh. I'm sure there's a lot of bullshit and phoniness in that scene. But it's sort of reassuring to know that the option is there, you know? They're called renunciates, because the renounce all this BS, right?
But anyway, Sapiens. I think you'll find a lot in it. It's from a scientific rather than a mystical point of view. So I think it anchors psychedelic observations within a factual framework.
https://www.amazon.ca/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/077103850X
Thanks for sharing your perspective. It seems to me—and I may be way off the mark—that you still believe in God and the Christian values of the the Mormon faith, but not in the institution of the Mormon church.
Question: have you investigated other Christian churches outside of the Mormon tradition? I know that for many on this sub, losing their belief in Mormonism has been accompanied by a loss of belief in Christianity or religion in general, but many others find a home in a new faith community. I am currently one of those people.
One thing that I learned as a product of my questioning my faith was that I didn't really understand non-Mormon Christianity very well at all. That is, what I thought I understood about Christianity was really more of a caricature of Christianity I had been given through my Mormon upbringing, and not really an accurate representation. As I started to research religion more broadly, I discovered that Christianity is actually far more diverse than I had supposed. Through my upbringing and bias-colored experiences, I had come to think of all of Christianity as a sort of Bible-belt, evangelical, born-again, fundamentalism, that in many ways is actually not that dissimilar to Mormonism in practice, despite significant differences in theology. However, I discovered that—primarily in the "mainline" Christian denominations—there is also a rich tradition of Christianity that remarkably different from what I had experienced or presupposed.
Anyway, the short version: it seems like you might still identify as non-evangelical Christian, but just not Mormon. That might be me projecting, but if not, you might consider looking into some of the mainline Christian faiths and seeing if you like it. And maybe you wont, but at least you'll know. If you are interested, I highly recommend reading Marcus Borg's The Heart of Christianity, which is a light and conversational read on 'progressive Christianity', or Karen Armstrong's The Case for God, which is a much more detailed treatise on religion throughout history but ultimately covers some of the same ideas.
Great! My best advice for you is to start your reading with Sam Harris' The End of Faith. You can buy a hardcover of it on Amazon for $3.11 plus shipping and in my opinion, it gives an excellent overview of the subject.
Another one I would read concurrently is Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Both are excellent for beginning your exploration.
This is a good start. http://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Beginners-Thubten-Chodron/dp/1559391537/ref=cm_lmf_tit_2
Also
http://www.amazon.com/Transforming-Mind-Dalai-Lama/dp/0722540302
This one is a good one on meditation. More of a Zen thing, still a good read though.
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Beginners-Shambhala-Library-first/dp/B004WKAMAM/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320336862&sr=1-2
I read this one out of curiosity. The Tibetans have an interesting view on death and the 'process' of dying.
http://www.amazon.com/Tibetan-Book-Dead-Liberation-Understanding/dp/0553370901/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1320336920&sr=1-1
Whoa. There is a lot here.
There is a lot of chest-beating on the part of the religious right; nobody misses an opportunity to feel superior (kind of like r/atheism here). I'm sure that would turn a lot of people off. For the most part, however, I think that real thoughtfulness is just not incentivized in modern American society. So people just don't consider church important, even if they call themselves religious. And I fell into that category. I just fell into an egocentric mode.
Most shamanic cultures believe that the shaman has the power to fly into the upper world and converse with spirits there. Siberian shamanism has been dated back as early as 30,000 years, certainly much longer than the Icarus myth.
Source
I had been eyeing this. Opinions on it?
Try the following:
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Continent-Europes-Twentieth-Century/dp/067975704X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309965374&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revolution/dp/0374227349/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309965406&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Barbarism-Civilization-History-Europe-Time/dp/019873073X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309965434&sr=8-1
[The Case for God] (http://www.amazon.com/Case-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307389804) by Karen Armstrong. It never mentions Mormonism, so it is unlikely your wife will feel like you are trying to persuade her away from it. In addition the author's goal is to promote faith in God. She goes through the development of religion from an anthropological method and covers a lot of different religions and theological view points. She does a very good job of explaining the different belief systems and why they are valuable. And this is the important part. She makes different views and ways of thinking important and valuable. One example is that her explanation of the Trinity doctrine made me actually feel okay with someone believing that version of deity. The book helped me understand how it is we ended up with extremist views like fundamentalist Christians and how my own views and atheism fit into that puzzle. I think it could be a great way to help her become comfortable with thinking outside the Mormon box and about looking at religion critically in general.
Uhm.. it all depends on what you want to write about!
Im sure google would help in your search as well
Robert Ornstein and James Burke.
https://www.amazon.com/Axemakers-Gift-Technologys-Capture-Control/dp/0874778565
Im just now starting to read Mercia Eliade, Idk if this book covers types of shamanism. (I’m highly certain it will) I just bought this book yesterday.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of... https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691119422?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
I enjoy critiques of intellectuals and learning relations between them. You should also check out The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism by him. Mark Lilla is very similar, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals and Politics and The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction Of course philosophers and politics would be very lacking without Isaiah Berlin Also Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: The Thinkers of The New Left is very good. Lastly The Opium of Intellectuals of Raymon Aron is a must-read classic.
Yes I love these theories. A conversation just like this lead into trying to convince my christian parents that Jesus was an alien. That's a story for another time.
The only literature that I've read that really dove deep into the theory of mushroom use in the bible:
The Gods of Eden by William Bramley
I'll warn you it really paints an open-minded interpretation of history that is along the exact same line of thinking as your post.
It's awesome to see someone interested in sociology (especially sociology of religion) in high school.
Before you start doing research, you need to think about what your actual question is. What is it about the sociology of religion that interests you? Are you interested in explaining religious variation? Are you interested in how different people experience religion? Are you interested in studying how religion influences people's behavior or beliefs? Think of something in the social world that you don't know, but want to know. The answer will guide how you approach research.
Also, not all of the sociology of religion is quantitative with large sample sizes. There's been some great qualitative work with small sample sizes done in the past. Nancy Ammerman has done some awesome qualitative work. One of my favorite sociology books is Baptist Battles which offers a window into the fundamentalist/progressive conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 80s.
If you are interested in more population level, quantitative stuff, take a look at Putnam and Cambell's American Grace. It's not really an academic book, but the research is solid and it's a great example of the kind of findings quantitative sociology of religion can produce.
If you find that interesting, then you should take some statistics courses and begin to learn statistical software like STATA, SPSS, R. A lot of that software is really daunting to learn at first. We had to learn R in my first year statistics course in grad school, and it had PhD students scratching their heads. Still, getting even a very basic understanding of something like that will get you a head start on research. You WILL need to learn a statistical software in order to quantitative research. If you feel comfortable with doing some basic statistics, check out The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) for some cool public use data.
Also, if you want to do research you need to read research. People here have suggested classic works like Berger's Sacred Canopy or stuff from Weber, Marx and Durkheim. That stuff is cool and all, and if you continue to be interested in sociology you will have to read that. However, nobody doing research today is trying to emulate what Berger, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim did. I suggest looking through some of the articles in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion to get a sense of the kinds of research sociologists of religion are doing now. Don't get too bogged down in ancient stuff said by old dead white guys.
One last thing -- absolutely nobody expects you do any kind of research in high school. All the stuff I mentioned are things I learned in grad school and I would consider way above what would be expected from a typical high school student. If you find it overwhelming and confusing that's totally normal. Research is overwhelming and confusing all the time.
> Points 1 and 3 in the summary I quoted apply to measures of income regardless of whether you're counting household size or individual income.
Okay. Taken together, the following issues would tend to make me question my men's wage example:
One resolution could be that we are looking at the wrong time frame (30-45 years vs. 8 years). EDIT: Here is an article from five thirty eight, looking at a 15 year time frame. There is some sense in attributing the rise of Trump to things that happened recently as opposed to 45 year trends.
It's also possible that what is "lost" can be not just economic but social or cultural ... e.g. Putnam #1, Putnam #2, Cahn and Carbone. This would still relate to loss aversion, it would just be a loss of a more intangible sort.
Jim Marrs - Rule by Secrecy
It is frustrating. But live life knowing that you know something that everyone else is oblivious of, it actually is pretty neat. Most teenage types have no obvious stake in the big picture so they don't care. Once they start paying taxes and realizing they are working for nothing a good chunk of the week they will start to care more. That's when they start watching TV and getting sucked into left-right politics. Just realize knowledge is power, it really is. If I can suggest some things to read to help you, if you have some extra cash or whatever, look for these on abebooks.com or amazon or whatever:
There are good reasons to believe it's true. But perhaps what I want to encourage you with is that everyone has seasons of doubt like this. I think it's easy for Christian communities to demonize doubt and dismiss it as somehow bad or sinful. But as Smith says in How (Not) to be Secular, most ordinary folks live in between the extremes of belief and doubt, between fundamentalism and new atheism, in a world haunted by the other: believers are haunted by doubt and skeptics are haunted by belief. It's only human to live in this space. That said, I encourage you to find a way forward, seeking truth, because if Christ is true, you'll find Him.
No, but the best predictor of party is, statistically speaking, religiosity.
Source.
I don't follow all the details on what Mormons believe, but I'm certain that Joseph Smith was either a fraud or a dupe, and in either case, Mormonism is false. In examining The Book of Mormon, I found a much greater consistency of style than the Bible has. Yet, like the Bible, it is supposed to be a collection of writings by different authors over a long period of time. This led me to believe it has a single author and so cannot be what it purports to me.
I'm inclined to believe that its author is Joseph Smith and to accept the description of Smith as a conman that Paul Kurtz gave in The Transcendental Temptation. But I also entertain the possibility that Smith was duped by extraterrestrials, as maintained by William Bramley in The Gods of Eden. I'm more skeptical of this latter idea, but it is actually hard to distinguish it from what Mormons themselves teach. After all, Mormons teach that God is an extraterrestrial, not the infinite being other Christians believe in.
If God is just an extraterrestrial, I don't understand in what sense he is actually supposed to be God. God is supposed to be the all-powerful creator of the universe, not a flesh-and-blood being like myself. Even if Smith actually got gold plates and seer stones from the angel Moroni (who would also be an alien according to Mormonism), I have no reason to trust Moroni or the "God" he serves. The Mormon God, even if he exists, is just an alien imposter, not an actual deity. Mormonism is essentially atheism dressed up as Christianity, making it one of the most ridiculous religions to ever exist.
And if you continue to believe that moderate Christians somehow magically transmogrify into fundies you'll still be missing the point.
I'm going to try to be as clear as I can. It seems as though you imagine religious belief as a sort of spectrum with "atheist" on one end and "fundamentalist" on the other. This is inaccurate and does not hold up to scrutiny. You could do worse than an intro Sociology text that deals with patterns of religious behavior. Even something older, like Mauss' General Theory of Magic.
Fundamentalism is not the opposite of atheism. You can want it to be that way, but wanting something to be true does not make it so. The opposite of atheism is probably something like negative theology. Interestingly, this topic is also taken up in Armstrong's book.
Fundamentalism and atheism actually live right next to each other on our imaginary "spectrum of belief." Fundamentalists believe in a silly sort of God - a sort of imminent being summoned forth to help self-sooth a frightened child. Anyone could invent this kind of thing. It's a totem, and idol. And it is as easily debunked and dismissed when exposed to even the most basic, sophomoric scrutiny. (i.e. Why doesn't God heal amputees? If God is male, what do his sexual organs look like? Why does God hate figs? and on and on.)
Incidentally, this is why I personally believe so many of these new sorts of courageous anti-theist crusaders come from lunatic fundamentalist families. They were weened on sugary pabulum and silly, idolatrous presentations of the Holy and it is easily dismissed and subject to ridicule. Those who don't make it out spend a lot of calories defending some really indefensible stuff.
For what its worth - I am not a religious "moderate." My heart is saturated with religious awe, speculation, a healthy measure of terror and trembling, and a constant gasping awareness of the cosmic, Holy Other. I rather suspect that I am several orders of magnitude more religious than even the most devout fundamentalist. So be careful who you are calling a "moderate." I think the fundamentalists are actually, in reality, mostly atheists in their hearts. Idolators at least - but more likely atheists.
The Collapse of Complex Societies
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires
Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall
Genes, Peoples, and Languages
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
Here are half-a-dozen good ones for you:
Please read actual scientific work on the societal effects of religion such as this and this before you make such statements.
Well, you're trying to believe in the god of your times. Go back, way back, to even primitive hunter-gatherer societies, and start tracing the evolution of god from that point.
You'll have a better appreciation for what god has been to different people over the years, and you won't be so bound to the particular flavor of god you were indoctrinated with. You may end up deriving a different belief in god, or no belief at all.
Read "The Case for God", by Karen Armstrong. She talks about this sort of thing from quite a different point of view. I think the book forms a good foundation that might help you see things from Peterson's point of view. Interestingly enough, she also has quite a lot to say about Newton and Darwin and how they relate to religion.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307389804
I should warn you, it's densely packed and will require your full attention throughout.
Give Michael Harner a try, followed by Mircea Eliade.
According to much of the evidence that William Bramley (among various other researchers) details in his book, people were born not to be loved...but to be slaves.
If you are honestly interested in this, I highly recommend reading The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. This book reviews much of what historians know about how the modern idea of the christian god came to be. It regularly compares what the bible says to what historians think really happened in history. It is a great read and is written in a way that probably wont offend a christian who appreciates good scholarly work.
Immanuel Wallerstein - World-Systems Analysis
The Axemaker's Gift by James Burke: All about examining of why we are the way we are and how we got here the way we did--it's the evolution of technology starting all the way back when monkeys came down from the trees.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: The science textbook you wish you got in school. Funny, informative, and provides an accessible way to learn about the world around us.
The Republic by Plato: Pretentious, I know, but this was the first philosophy book that ever really opened my mind to different types of thought.
Hi friend! I don't know how well this book would fit the general argument of your class, but it made a deep impression on me in college:
https://www.amazon.com/Axemakers-Gift-Robert-Ornstein/dp/0874778565
https://www.amazon.ca/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/077103850X
I've been reading this recently:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Penguin-History-World-Fifth/dp/0141030429/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
It is a long ass book (like 1100ish pages) just to warn you. I bought it to fill in the gaps in the more in-depth stuff I did at university and so far it has been great.
Anything by Stephen Jay Gould
The Scars of Evolution -- What Our Bodies Tell Us About Human Origins by Elaine Morgan.
The Ten Thousand Year Explosion
Anything by Richard Feynman. Not always science, but brilliant and entertaining.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is on my list to read.
Looks like you've got a Spanish language edition ... a good translation is important.
This is the edition I used, Robert Thurman is well respected. Plus it's got an introduction by the Dalai Lama ... so it's got that going for it.
Now I'm depressed. Zubrin's a climate denier?
(interesting overview of the book from amazon.com:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1590179021/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_e.cNyb8A290F8)
We don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us.
The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe. And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas.
Lilla begins with three twentieth-century philosophers—Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss—who attributed the problems of modern society to a break in the history of ideas and promoted a return to earlier modes of thought. He then examines the enduring power of grand historical narratives of betrayal to shape political outlooks since the French Revolution, and shows how these narratives are employed in the writings of Europe’s right-wing cultural pessimists and Maoist neocommunists, American theoconservatives fantasizing about the harmony of medieval Catholic society and radical Islamists seeking to restore a vanished Muslim caliphate.
The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out. But the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as formidable a historical force. We live in an age when the tragicomic nostalgia of Don Quixote for a lost golden age has been transformed into a potent and sometimes deadly weapon. Mark Lilla helps us to understand why.
Start by reading something very generic but still substantial, perhaps 'The Penguin History of the World'
https://www.amazon.com/New-Penguin-History-World-Fifth/dp/0141030429/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1486204805&sr=8-2&keywords=penguin+history+of+the+world
It will naturally gloss over a lot of details but provide a general overview.
You will naturally find you are more drawn to certain epochs / regions so you can then delve deeper into what you are interested in, using either the bibliography or general searching.
Rule by Secrecy by Jim Marrs is a good starting point. It's not really about hidden cabals, but instead elucidates the existence and workings on known secretive groups. For example the CFR, Trilaterals, and Bilderbergers are quite real and any intellectual discussing forgein policy, such as Chomsky, will bring them up. They are the shot callers including Queens, US presidents, and the stupid crazy rich. Marrs can be a little out there as far as aliens and stuff, but this book is mostly a research about these organizations that call the shots. Everything is indexed and footnoted, as Marrs is an investigative journalist by education and career.
Next I would recommend The Creature from Jekyll Island. The federal reserve is the most important institution involved in our economy and every American should know about it, love it or hate it.
Thats all I can think of off the top of my head. My books are packed for a move but I'm sure you'll get some good comments.
https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-God-Robert-Wright/dp/0316734918
From the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy.
Here’s a great book for you https://www.amazon.com/Right-Side-History-Reason-Purpose/dp/0062857908
I’m on the opposite end of this because he’s in my daily podcast rotation for the last 2 years, so I’ve definitely seen a ton of bad content (typically his religious commentaries are just dumb), but I’ve also seen him go very deep into topics to the point where I really respect his effort.
While his books he wrote in his 20’s are terrible (Porn generation, etc), his most recent book is actually pretty interesting since it’s a primer on the history of western philosophy
He’s definitely got bad times, but it irks me when everyone pretends like he’s an idiot. I respect him a ton.
You seem reasonable enough to listen to this. People who are worried about robots and over population are idiots without any evidence backing up their claims.
http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Despair-Environmentalists-Pseudo-Scientists-Antihumanism/dp/159403737X
TLDR: These antihumanists think robots will kill humans, when it will likely cube or square our standard and living and food yields.
All of it proven awesome for everybody. With MATH!
Currently endeavoring through J.M. Roberts' The New Penguin History of the World. It's a juggernaut of a book, but is enjoyable.
jakenichols: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link
It is frustrating. But live life knowing that you know something that everyone else is oblivious of, it actually is pretty neat. Most teenage types have no obvious stake in the big picture so they don't care. Once they start paying taxes and realizing they are working for nothing a good chunk of the week they will start to care more. That's when they start watching TV and getting sucked into left-right politics. Just realize knowledge is power, it really is. If I can suggest some things to read to help you, if you have some extra cash or whatever, look for these on abebooks.com or amazon or whatever:
>Here's the thing buckaroo, and I know this might take a few moments to sink through your thick tankie skull, but I really do not give a shit what some dumbfuck tanklord on the internet thinks of me.
Lol, glad you went out of your way to let me know you don't care what I think of you.
How about all the rest of the people (these topics cover global exploitation, so let's just say 5 billion people roughly that these topics directly relate to) that could potentially read this and see you dismissing entire theories because you just feel like it?
I link books, and you scoff. Who is the joke?
On the topic of what has influenced my thinking as a "tankie". Feel free to respond by saying I don't read books, or that the authors are tankies/stalinists/reactionaries/non-marxists/smelly/bad people
www.readsettlers.org
https://www.amazon.com/World-Systems-Analysis-Introduction-Immanuel-Wallerstein/dp/0822334429
https://www.amazon.com/Divided-World-Class-Zak-Cope/dp/1894946413
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/wiki/debunk
(by the way, I don't care what you think of me. nanny nanny poo poo)
Check out The Axemaker's Gift.
I've been reading this book. Very detailed but lacking sources.
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Penguin-History-World/dp/0141030429/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334083648&sr=1-1
That states have arisen throughout human history?
Take a course in world history or read the rather interesting book: The Origins of Political Order
> I've seen this before about religious people being more charitable. It is entirely possible it is true, but what are the studies counting and are they based on self-reporting or other forms of data?
" In our book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert Putnam and I show that there is a strong connection between being religious and being charitable. Not surprisingly, the most highly religious Americans contribute their time and treasure to religious causes. But they also give to secular causes—at a higher rate than do the most secular Americans."
Merchants of Despair.
I've noticed that much of the internet ascribes that quote to "unknown" or "anonymous", which is quite unfair to Mr Harris. Therefore, I would like to add a plug for his book, from which the quote originates:
http://www.amazon.com/End-Faith-Religion-Terror-Future/dp/0393035158
It's an excellent read, and practically a must-read for any atheist who engages in debate on the subject.
I'm sorry if you took my comment spitefully as that was not my intent. Here is some reading you might find interesting:
I would love this book used! Thanks for the contest!
Religion: False but necessary.
​
According to a 2015 University of Auckland (New Zealand) study published in the journal Nature, religious belief in judgment after death was a positive (correlative) predictor of the eventual size of 96 past pacific island civilizations. Where a culture lacked this religious idea, the population rarely grew beyond the size of a few villages as a result of "political complexities." Common moral values are required to build a society greater than Dunbar's Number, and the historically best proven way to achieve this is via religion. In fact, the decline of the this common moral value (more commonly referred to as "Social Capital") has been lamented at length by the renowned Robet Putnam and more recently Ben Shapiro (Book). Those authors argue that the depopulation of common meeting places (like churches, pubs and Elk lodges) where community is formed is to blame for the recent disenfranchisement and political apathy we are seeing in the United States.
​
Plenty of foolish things are done in the name of religious beliefs. The same can be said of many ill-founded scientific causes like eugenics and phrenology. My point is that we've only made it this far as a result of the common values shared between us and reinforced by our involvement in community -- and that churches are a huge, if empirically irrelevant, vehicle for that community. Not a roadblock.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I'm agnostic. I've had moments where things happened I couldn't explain and I believe in ESP/ghosts. Really!
Have you ever read the Tibetan Book of the Dead? http://www.amazon.com/The-Tibetan-Book-Dead-Understanding/dp/0553370901
Some scientists certaintly think so. See The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
the gods of eden by william bramley. could be fiction, could be non-fiction, depending on your take. i recommend keeping an open mind, and ask a lot of questions while reading the book. questions about your own belief, and questions about what the author is presenting.
Any of these? They all deal with the subject and are fantastic reads...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tibetan-Book-Dead-Understanding/dp/0553370901
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Clear-Light-Advice-Consciously/dp/0743244699/ref=pd_sim_b_1/180-2841924-2125323
http://www.amazon.com/Advice-Dying-Living-Well-Taming/dp/0712662235
Atheism is most common among the following populations: white, college-educated, non-southern, younger (Generation Y/Millennials).
The best source of this data is here:
http://amzn.com/1416566732
You should be able to google to find articles about the absence of women and minorities in the atheist movement, at least in the US.
Obama was a highly dignified man, there is no doubt about that. He had many social graces which created a standard in your mind. Lets revisit some previous presidents.
President Jefferson described President Adams as a
> "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."
Very presidential eh?
Presidential George W. Bush wore cowboy boots with the Royal seal of the House of Windsor on the sole when he met the Queen of England. He constantly embarrassed the United States with his harebrained verbal oopsies.
President Clinton received and gave oral sex to an intern while in office.
Trump is intentionally baiting you, and baiting everyone else. He is intentionally saying things that will offend sensitive individuals, it has purpose and intention. That purpose and intention is to reverse the course we are on towards political correctness. If you have an interest, you should read The Shipwrecked Mind, it really lays out the idealism of both the liberal and conservative crowds.
This intentional baiting, or trolling is a whole movement in the media/politics/social issues.
Edit: I wanted to add this tidbit because it means a lot to me. We have a lot of very graceful, dignified people in our country who are well educated and well spoken. We often forget the roots we came from though, we are the fruit of the lower classes from all over the world. Robert Downy Jr. hit this right on the nose during an interview in France.
Your grandma's heart probably was weakened by the cancer treatments. It happens.
Sick dogs will get sicker, usually.
A lot of men would rather break up with you than deal with something difficult like a death or falling in love. They don't like feelings.
Oh, guess what? There is no god. BUT that doesn't mean there isn't joy in the world.
I'm sorry you are going through so much and it's normal to be angry. Tr reading this http://www.amazon.com/The-Tibetan-Book-Dead-Understanding/dp/0553370901
I'd like to put out a counterpoint to a lot of the comments about "finding holes in the books" etc. You don't need to convince her that there is no God, Bible is mythology, etc. You don't want to come off as attacking her beliefs or from a side of negativity. You need to convince her that you're an adult, a good person, and that you've found another "belief system" that fits better for you and deserves her respect. You want to approach her as Carl Sagan, not Richard Dawkins.
I would highly encourage you to read Karen Armstrong (A History of God, or The Case for God). They're both not only fascinating books on the evolution of religion in general, but they show a non-theistic side of religion/spirituality within Christianity. She'll likely feel more comfortable with your lack of belief in a literal personal God if you approach from an angle of something WITHIN Christian theology. Another good view of this is When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy, which describes the positive side of atheism and science. Maybe give her one of these books rather than The God Delusion--it's something she's more likely to read.
Ultimately, most religious people having their own different religious beliefs than they are with people rejecting their beliefs. Present atheism as something positive, inspiring, and fulfilling for you.
>there are no legitimate religious terrorists, only terrorists, who fail to follow the teachings of their religion, or else misinterpret it.
Where are you coming up with this? Where does anybody come up with this. Have you read the Bible? How about the Koran or the hadiths? Religious people who show restraint and tolerance are the ones not following the teachings of their religion. Islam and Christianity both perpetrate and tolerate absolute bullshit including violence toward innocents. We need to all stop believing the TV when it tells us that Islam is a religion of peace. It's absolutely not. I recommend that you and madcaesar read some of Sam Harris' books.. Google him and listen to what he has to say.
Edit: quoting
>Firstly, a higher IQ is closely correlated to factors beyond genetics.
Wrong. The American Psychological Association puts the heritability of intelligence at around 0.75 for adults. Based on the available research, I'd say intelligence is somewhere between 70-80% heritable.
>Diet and education are by far the most important.
Not even close:
>The role of nutrition in intelligence remains obscure. Severe childhood malnutrition has clear negative effects, but the hypothesis that particular “micronutrients” may affect intelligence in otherwise adequately-fed populations has not yet been convincingly demonstrated.
Look, I don't doubt that nutrition has some role to play in the development of intelligence, but to claim that nutrition is more important than genetics is absurd.
>Both suffer in poor communities.
As Murray and Hernstein wrote: "The average black and white differ in IQ at every level of socioeconomic status (SES) , but they differ more at high levels of SES than at low levels." Impoverished whites do better on tests like the SATs than upper-middle/upper class blacks.
>But beyond that, in the amount of time the various human races were separated from each other, evolution simply couldn't have made people THAT different.
Obviously, you haven't read the book The 10,000 Year Explosion. It argues that human evolution rapidly increased thanks to civilization.
I think that the cognitive differences between the races are quite minimal when compared to the physical differences. Still, it seems quite evident that the cold northern environments of Asia and Europe would select for intelligence and cooperation. The idea that evolution worked its magic on skin color, facial structure, bone density, penis size, etc. but stopped at the brain is a farce.
>We know there is no mechanism in Asians' bodies that makes them smarter than anyone else.
Yes, but nobody has ever claimed there is a mechanism in Asians' bodies that makes them smarter than anyone else. What people claim is that the races have a different distribution of gene frequencies, and some genes that are correlated with intelligence are more common among some population groups.
>But, I like how you think 100,000 Japanese Americans to represent the entire Asian community in the United states
I was specifically talking about Japanese-Americans.
>then compare them to the plight of 39 million African Americans living today.
My point was that there are Americans who have had it much worse than blacks and yet they've been able to thrive. Of course, I attribute this mostly to their higher average IQs.
>And yes, there are poor Asian communities riddled with crime. Look at the LA neighborhoods rife with Asian street gangs.
There will always be a large number of low IQ members of any race or ethnic group. Still, I'd bet the poorest 90% Asian neighborhood will be safer than the average 90% black neighborhood.
International Studies major here to say that this video is apologetic pablum. Many assumptions are made, including the implicit assumptions that countries develop in a vacuum and that all countries' trajectory began at the same point in time on a level playing field. The video assumes that strong institutions and cultural beliefs affect degree of development instead of being a product of it. Nowhere is there any mention of core-periphery relationship, history, etcetera.
If you want an introductory understanding of uneven development start with Ankie Hoogvelt's Globalization and the Postcolonial World, Immanuel Wallerstine's World Systems Analysis, and Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. For an intermediate understanding complete the first 3 then read Adorno/Horkeimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, and Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.
Ok, first off I'm not trolling nor am I a theist dumb dumb but here me out.
I'd argue that Atheism IS a form of religion and is in fact the next logical progression after Christianity.
I recently read an interesting book that got me thinking about this, The Evolution of God (http://www.amazon.ca/Evolution-God-Robert-Wright/dp/0316734918). The author talks about the progress from caveman religions all the way up to the modern day Christianity. In each religious iteration there is a reordering of the deities, a streamlining of the gods if you will. First we started out with many many gods that each control there respected domains and each time the major religions simplify these down. From multiple pagan gods to the set of gods worshiped in the roman/greek times to the set of god/angles/saints of the catholic religion to modern religions that just believe in a single divine god down to atheism that have cut out a single god all together.
However reason I would say the atheism is still a religion is that many of the beliefs from Christianity are still present but there is a lack of a single point of worship (unless you count Dawkins for some). Atheists still have the need to congregate together and to share there belief system and even try to convert others to their belief (for example putting atheist signs on buses, sticks in bibles at book stores, even arguing with your teacher when they bring up atheism is a religion, etc).
This is just something I've been pondering for the last while and its not intended to piss anyone off, what do you guys think?
https://www.amazon.com/American-Fascists-Christian-Right-America/dp/0743284461
https://www.amazon.com/Republican-Brain-Science-Science-Reality/dp/1118094514
https://www.amazon.com/Insane-Clown-President-Dispatches-Circus/dp/0399592466
https://www.amazon.com/Idiot-America-Stupidity-Became-Virtue/dp/0767926153
https://www.amazon.com/Republican-War-Science-Chris-Mooney/dp/0465046762
https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Off-Without-Manifesto-Secession/dp/145161666X/
https://www.amazon.com/How-Fight-Conservative-Daniel-Kurtzman/dp/140226576X
It took me less than 2 minutes to find all of these
This comes off as political tut-tutting. Here is my take.
(1) The popular take-away from GC&S is precisely what Romney put forth, namely, that: "the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there." Pointing out that the availability of iron ore does not constitute a significant difference just seems petty.
(2) Romney's culture-heavy explanation from the recent editorial is obviously pandering, but Jared Diamond is also guilty of pandering, in that he's unwilling to consider that there might be biological differences between groups. Romney and Diamond are environmental determinists: cut from the same cloth. So Diamond is close to hypocritical in calling Romney out.
Except you know, preservation of values and moral virtue. If you’re actually curious you should take the chance to read this book sometime
https://www.amazon.com/Right-Side-History-Reason-Purpose/dp/0062857908/ref=asc_df_0062857908/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=385575011665&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17354138199487605660&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9004568&hvtargid=pla-607118584930&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=77500929574&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=385575011665&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17354138199487605660&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9004568&hvtargid=pla-607118584930
The real problem is that a lot of the people who deserve criticism and backlash use rhetoric that starts to tread into the Nazi camp.
You use Shapiro as your example so let's take one of his main talking points: "The West is great." Well what do Nazis have to say about the matter? "The Nazis said that since Western civilization, created and maintained they asserted mostly by Nordics, was obviously superior to other civilizations, then the "Nordic" peoples were superior to all other races..."
So yeah. The rhetoric isn't that much different. So why are we so concerned with splitting hairs over what we label these clearly terrible people who are basically saying the same thing that Nazis did?
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-8-reasons-why-new-york-rents-are-so-ridiculously-high-2013-7
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
http://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-Metropolitan-ebook/dp/B00872FOEU/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1407771205&sr=1-1&keywords=zoned+out
http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier-ebook/dp/B0049U4HTW/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1407771281&sr=1-1&keywords=triumph+of+the+city
http://blogs.reuters.com/reihan-salam/2013/08/23/in-new-york-the-rent-doesnt-have-to-be-too-damn-high/
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/06/san_francisco_housing_policy_it_would_be_a_better_city_if_twice_as_many.html