(Part 2) Top products from r/AskALiberal
We found 21 product mentions on r/AskALiberal. We ranked the 107 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
22. A People's History of the United States: 1492-2001
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 1
23. Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
24. Surrounded by Idiots: Fighting Liberal Lunacy in America
Sentiment score: -1
Number of reviews: 1
25. A People's History of the United States
Sentiment score: -1
Number of reviews: 1
26. The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Getting Axed, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
27. Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
Harper Perennial
28. A People's History of the United States
Sentiment score: -1
Number of reviews: 1
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
29. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
30. The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
31. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
Great product!
32. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Sentiment score: -1
Number of reviews: 1
The Better Angels of Our Nature Why Violence Has Declined
33. Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600--1900
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
34. Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
Oxford University Press USA
35. Iran's Nuclear Program and International Law: From Confrontation to Accord
Sentiment score: -1
Number of reviews: 1
36. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history (Volume I))
Sentiment score: 0
Number of reviews: 1
Oxford University Press
37. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
Oxford University Press USA
38. The Road to Serfdom: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
politicians, scholars, general readersempowering government, economic controlever-changing political and social climatestransitions in Europecommunism & capitalism in the 1990s
> An approach that places high value on personal responsibility is a more hands off approach that leaves people to take responsibility for solving their problems themselves without pushing them towards any particular choice.
Agreed... what's toxic is a policy which interferes with incentives to encourage negative behaviors... a highly likely moral hazard of any welfare program and one Democrats have not been careful to avoid.
> The sugar tax is an example that's been shown to work.
I'm not an advocate of a sugar tax for a lot of the reasons you mentioned above. I was just pointing out that at least it attempts to align incentives with the policy goal. A lot of welfare programs do the opposite.
> I think government changing incentives takes away from the individual responsibility of the person whose incentives are changed.
I basically agree with that. And for that reason I am NOT in favor of a sin tax on sugar. After all this back and forth I think I've figured out our disconnect:
You think government should paternalistically create positive incentives to encourage positive behaviors. The kind of policies advocated by Cass Sunstein n Nudge
I disagree, I think that's a paternalistic view of government's role, even a soft form of authoritarianism which is ultimately harmful to a spirit of self-reliance which I think is both right and just for it's own sake, and which is necessary for social health over the longer haul. Outside of actual criminality people should be free to make their own decisions AND potentially to suffer the consequences of the decisions they make.
Where I'm talking about government policy ignoring incentives it's where government programs, usually those intended to alleviate suffering, create negative incentives which promote negative behaviors.
> A focus on individual responsibility sounds to me like letting people have full agency over their lives and not interfering at all.
For the most part... yes.
> If the incentives are such that they make bad choices then so be it.
I'm ALL for removing externalities which create bad incentives. I'm all for education of the young which seeks to promote and reinforce, and even enforce moral behavior within the schools.
I'm NOT for holding the hand of a grown-ass man and telling him he shouldn't drink so much soda. If you want to create positive incentives to produce positive social outcomes I'd submit that the best social outcomes can ONLY come from people who are self-reliant and do not NEED or WANT a nanny holding their hand to nudge them into making good decisions for them. This kind of paternalistic nannying can only produce a culture of reliance and dependency which in the long run cannot produce positive results.
As I said before... this does NOT preclude any and all policies that provide a helping hand for people in need. What id does say is that such a helping hand is always at risk of creating moral hazards promoting the underlying social pathologies which created the need in the first place by removing the painful consequences of them. There's a balance there and one we've gotten badly wrong in the past with dire consequences we see in the underclass both black and white today.
If you're interested in an eastern philosophy perspective but have a western cultural background there's no one better than Alan Watts to start with. He's an expert at translating difficult concepts into a frame of reference that's far more digestible.
I'd start here with The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Alternatively you can listen to many of his talks on YouTube for free. I highly recommend this as his character is half the joy of his work. Here's a relevant talk that covers some of the same material as The Book, just in less depth obviously.
If you enjoy his work, then you can move on to more difficult material. I'm a huge fan of Nagarjuna and his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way". It's an incredible work but you can't just start there or you won't have the necessary conceptual vocabulary.
I don't really know. My guess would be something described by Charles Murray in his new book (https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X): essentially, there is a segment of the country who is practicing stable, traditional paths of structuring their life like long term stable marriages, raising children in two parent households, etc, and there is a segment of the country which is not, and the former group is building a virtuous cycle, while the latter group is stuck in a vicious cycle.
This phenomenon likely has many many causes, but I suspect some of which are the decline of religion and the lack of alternative value systems to replace it in certain smaller communities, the prevalence and ease of escapes from socially-bonding activities like video games and drugs, the dramatic restructuring of economic activity away from traditional jobs to more dynamic creative type jobs.
The US is a much bigger place than the European countries, with a smaller social safety tradition, so these differences are probably more exaggerated in the US.
The FED website is probably the best place to learn about US policy. Otherwise, this is a pretty academic area, so I'm not sure if there's a single source I could recommend.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy.htm
​
Bank of England: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/
European Central Bank: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/html/index.en.html
Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/
The IMF has a page on monetary policy: https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/16/20/Monetary-Policy-and-Central-Banking
If you want to really study it, then this is a pretty well known textbook, this one is a good intro, and of course Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio is interesting & very light reading.
Books:
---
Podcasts:
The podcast so far has talked about: The English Civil War, The American Revolution, The French Revolution, The Haitian Revolution (the first successful slave-led revolution), The Venezuelan Revolution (and basically all of Northwest South America), The French Revolution of 1830, and they're now on The Revolutions of 1848.
These revolutions as you listen to them end up having common themes and patterns, and their political ideas shaped modern political discourse, such that what we now consider the 'acceptable bounds' of political discourse was largely determined by these earlier revolutions.
> Well first of all you’re part of the problem.
Ah, I'm part of the problem - with my single motherhood and putting down straight white males and my man-hating. Interesting.
>I don’t know what you gain by denying what I have said but okay
I gain the truth, and I gain the opportunity to show others what the truth is.
>Like I said you don’t have to put men down to raise everyone else up.
Did you read ANYTHING AT ALL that I typed, or did you just assume what I said because that was easier for you to respond to?
>I think it is your false assumption that just because someone is white and male means they are somehow impervious from human problems specifically.
I think it is your false assumption that I believe anything of the sort.
>This is actually sexist and racist.
Sure thing, snowflake.
>In fact the things I have said would benefit society as a whole, specifically the African American community and even women.
Because a woman can't do anything "without her man"?
>Can I not advocate for white men?
Do white men really need someone to advocate for them? Is this another "War on Christmas" thing where someone in conservative media made up a bad situation so that they'd have something to rant about? Because white men are in an awfully good position in our society.
>Do you have a problem with this?
What I have a problem with is ignorance. Something you would appear to have in droves.
>If you do then fuck off. Label me alt-right if you want, makes no difference to me.
You absolutely sound like you get your information from the alt-right media, at the very least. What is most worrying is that you don't seem interested in correcting your poor information at all.
>The decline of men (https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Men-American-Getting-Flipping/dp/0061353159)
Your sourcing about the decline of men is a link to a book that some dude wrote. Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but that's not sourcing your statement at all. You're going to have to do a lot better than that to convince anyone of anything.
>Side effects (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-14/the-side-effects-of-the-decline-of-men)
So my question here is...did you even read that article? Or did you just Google something and that title met the match so you included it? Because that article doesn't say what you seem to believe it is saying.
>I was referring to interpersonal male role models. A father figure. Not some guy on TV
First of all, that's not at all what you said. You said there were no positive male role models or models for masculinity. All of those I cited are exactly that (plus many more).
As for the ridiculous suggestion that there aren't positive role models for young men to look up to in their everyday lives, well I'm not sure how you could possibly know such a thing. Where is your documentation of this evidence? Or is it just something that you were told?
I've got to be honest - you're clearly not here to find out what we think. You're clearly here to rant at us. We're not going to buy into the idiocy that someone sold you on.
I'm sorry that your life sucks so bad that you fall for crap like this...I really am. Maybe you can find a positive male role model in your life to fix this...of course, my emphasis would be on "positive", because it's clear to me that you have more than enough negative influences in your media.
In all honesty, check out every other definition of populism. I'm the one who brought the word up, so if I'm using a commonly accepted definition of it (I am), it's better to discuss the actual topic than fight about semantics. I've also defended elsewhere which definition I mean. And I believe it IS a common behavior that Trump and Bernie share.
For reference of the traditional definition of the word populism I'm using, see:
> https://www.amazon.com/Populism-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0190234873
or
> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/what-is-populist-trump/516525/
or (kinda light description/summary)
> https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15615.html
It seems silly to argue the validity of an accepted definition... so check out the definition I'm defending, and let me know if you think Trump is not a populist by that definition (the experts I've quoted DO categorize him as one). Or let me know if you think Bernie is not a populist by that definition (the experts hadn't discussed that). Or let me know if you think that definition of populism is a "good thing" (as a Marxist, you might. Populism is a viable baseline "thin philosophy" for communism, though I believe you can have Marxism without populism)
Otherwise, there's not much else to discuss.
I'd say you're conflating identity politics with interest group politics. Trump definitely played identity politics, and it's toxic as shit. That doesn't mean his opposition should do the same.
I think Once and Future Liberal should be mandatory reading for anyone on the left (or frankly, right) these days. Obama actually stayed mostly clear of identity politics, which is why he won. He was, in other words, running to be everyone's president and on a message of unification and hope. He never once shat on any specific group, ethnic or otherwise, nor did try to come off a victim.
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.
Did somebody say "A People's History of the United States"?
In no particular order:
Sorry I got tired of making links. I’m on my phone.
The vast majority of capital and assets are in the hands of white people. That is an obstacle.
Further explanation gets into history, as today's world is necessarily a product of the history leading to it, and the answer a liberal is giving you is: ask a professor. Their literal job is to study and explain these things. You can keep posting your question, but I gave you the tools to get your answer. Are you actually looking to broaden your knowledge of a subject or is this an exercise in argument for you?
E: here are some books that will answer at least some aspects of your very broad and complex question:
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
A People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn
Systematic Racism by Joe Feagin
For a more humanistic account of the black experience, try anything by James Baldwin.
>1 - 9 years old
They're from the relevant time period, when these accusations of a "Possible Military Dimension" (previously called "Alleged Studies") were being addressed by the IAEA.
2- Whatever nice distinctions you want to make, there was never any evidence that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program or a nuclear program with a military purposes or whatever other way you want to put it. Zero. None. And FYI Iran's enrichment program started before the 1979 Islamic Revolution with the encouragement and support of the US and not to mention that many countries have or will be devleoping the same technology of enrichment which is why most of the countries of hte world backed Iran in the dispute wit hthe US over the right to enrichment (not because they want to make nukes but because like Iran they too want to have an independent source of reactor fuel not dependendent on outsiders)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3983-2005Mar26.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/opinion/12iht-edferguson.2781236.html
http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/bush-proposals/
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/non-aligned-summit-belies-isolation-iran
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_11/NAFuel
3 again you're making nonsense distinctions. If Iran had a nuclear weapons program or anything about nuclear weapons, then it was the job of the IAEA to say so instead it had consistently stated otherwise. The worst it has said is that Iran had a program to develop technology that was "relevant to" nuclear weapons. Which is what the NPT is supposed to do -- requires sharing nuclear technology, Article V of the NonProliferation Treaty even requires the sharing of data from nuclear test explosions with countries such as Iran.
4
if You claim my statement has been "directly contradicted" then please cite the language instead of two entire reports. Also, please make sure you also have the legal qualification to understand and interpret what you're reading and versus the actual requirements of the NPT. May I suggest:
https://www.amazon.com/Irans-Nuclear-Program-International-Confrontation/dp/0190635711
5 Removing the possibility
Ten years ago, 40 nations were estimated to have the capability to make nukes quickly if they wanted to -- that's 1 out of 4 nations on Earth.
http://old.seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2002041473_nukes21.html
They don't because nukes are actually useless and cause more problems
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/ten-reasons-iran-doesnt-want-the-bomb-7802
https://thinkprogress.org/colin-powell-nuclear-weapons-are-useless-4ab6657759c7/
The assumption built into your argument is that nukes are a universally-desired thing that any country would get to deter any other country that has nukes. Well if that's just not true and is very simplistic.
This is aside from the fact that Iran already has proven that it opposed to WMD when it refused to resort to chemical warfare legally and in selfdefense against Iraq's US-backed CW attacks on Iran. Iran instead accepted the casualties of 100,000 people. So when Iran says it opposes WMDs on principle, it has already proven it with blood.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030102224708/http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/programs/dc/briefs/030701.htm
At the time, the US was trying to shift the blame for gassing the Kurds from Saddam onto the Iranians ! https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/opinion/halabja-america-didnt-seem-to-mind-poison-gas.html
The NPT requires the sharing of nuclear technology, all of which "could be" used for nukes. There is no way to "remove the possibility" from any country without violating that country's rights. Note that every country has the right to make nukes if they want. In fact the NPT Art X even allows signatories to legally withdraw. So who gave the US the right to "allow" who to do what? The US itself is in violation of its own NPT obligations, FYI.
>storage of high-grade uranium
Iran never produced any "high grade" uranium and FYI in the past the US gave Iran weapons-grade uranium along with plutonium. So no that's not the issue and never was.
The deal had nothing to do with any actual nuclear threat. There was none.
Iran conssitently made BETTER nuclear offers that were ignored by the US to maintain the regime-chage pretext
So I guess what you're really asking is "How much do you hate Republicans as people?"
The answer is not a whole lot. We usually have republicans in our family and among our friends.
What I do get angry about is the Surrounded by Idiots attitude. I find a lot of - not all, but definitely a lot of - conservatives to think of anyone with a view they don't immediately agree with as brainwashed, a "snowflake", or otherwise unable to see some obvious truth than anyone who isn't an "idiot" would accept. Ann Coulter, whose articles are always filled with factual inaccuracies, is probably the worst example.
The close minded attitude I'm describing is very annoying, but don't confuse annoyance with personal hate or even thinking someone is a bad person. Ann Coulter is wrong about most everything but if I saw her walking into a building with her hands full I'd probably still hold the door for her. I can't say I wouldn't make fun of her for accepting help from a traitor, but she deserves to be treated like a human being.
Wrong
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/12/07/is-it-time-for-progressives-to-stop-venerating-fdr/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.351c7ce3f32d
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/20/9766896/woodrow-wilson-racist
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism
> According to Caro, Robert Parker, Johnson’s sometime chauffer, described in his memoir Capitol Hill in Black and White a moment when Johnson asked Parker whether he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “nigger” or “chief.” When Parker said he would, Johnson grew angry and said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, nigger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”
Ouch, history isn't on your side. The only defense is "we changed" and while that is true for most democrats, its not true for the far left that treat right leaning minorities like uncle toms.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but the summation of your argument is that the current structure of human society produces more harm than it prevents. If you really want a detailed and largely data-driven answer to this, read the book "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker. It will give you a better answer to this question than anything else you'll find.
But to surmise the arguments in the book, the answer is a resounding NO. History has shown, time and again, that as society has become less structured by norms, rules, and laws, it becomes significantly more brutal. A big part of this is that, as you have more and more people competing with each other for limited resources, you get this never ending cycle of what are called Hobbesian traps ("I must strike at my enemy first and annihilate him or else he'll do the same to me") that creates these perpetual cycles of violence between groups. This violence then hinders or even reverts technological developments that could then lead to increasing these resources via increased production or more efficient use (who has time to produce pesticide when you've gotta constantly be keeping an eye on the village 2 miles away?).
Railing against globalism is kind of a fad nowadays, but few people realize just how much it has helped reduce overall violence in the world. As much as I hate what trade agreements have done to the American middle class, I can't deny that it's made major power war much less likely by creating huge economic incentives against, while at the same time significantly improving the living standards in many countries (China especially).