(Part 2) Top products from r/milliondollarextreme

If you want to just know buzzwords to throw around, spend a bunch of time clicking around on Wikipedia, and watch stuff like Crash Course on YouTube. It's easy to absorb, and you'll learn stuff, even if it's biased, but at least you'll be learning.

If you want to become SMARTER, one of my biggest pieces of advice is to either carry a notebook with you, or find a good note taking app you like on your phone. When someone makes a statement you don't understand, write it down and parse it up.

So for instance, write down "Social Democracy", and write down "The New Deal", and go look them up on simple.wikipedia.com (Put's all of it in simplest language possible), it's a great starting point for learning about any topic, and provides you a jumping board to look more deeply into it.

If you are really curious about starting an education, and you absolutely aren't a reader, some good books to start on are probably:

"Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" by Randall Munroe

"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

"Philosophy 101" by Paul Kleinman, in fact the ____ 101 books are all pretty good "starter" books for people that want an overview of a topic they are unfamiliar with.

"The World's Religions" by Huston Smith

"An Incomplete Education" by Judy Jones and Will Wilson

Those are all good jumping off points, but great books that I think everyone should read... "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, "Western Canon" by Harold Bloom, "Education For Freedom" by Robert Hutchins, The Norton Anthology of English Literature; The Major Authors, The Bible.

Read anything you find critically, don't just swallow what someone else says, read into it and find out what their sources were, otherwise you'll find yourself quoting from Howard Zinn verbatim and thinking you're clever and original when you're just an asshole.

> often times the answer seems self-evident at a certain point, even if it would be difficult to convince someone else

I feel this way a lot too. Sometimes it feels like even if you were to find an absolute truth, nobody would want to listen anyways.

>For what I'm working on tonight, trying to develop ideas of how belief systems get constructed in people, and what it takes to make them change or shift them.

I've been reading a book on this sort of thing lately. Here's a link. I'm most of the way through and it seems to be a pretty well put together book that makes some good points about how and why people end up believing the way they do. You might like it.

What kinda of history you feeling? Broad histories of empires/states or more specific accounts?

I was mentioning this the other day as one of the best adventures I've read: https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-Conquest-Mexico-Bernal-Castillo/dp/030681319X

First hand account of Diaz's conquest.

This might be the same book but cheaper: https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-New-Spain-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140441239

Idk I found mine in a goodwill and it's one of my favorite books.

The wet dog smell is actually true. Native American trackers described whites as smelling like wet dog, blacks smelled like rotting beef, Mexicans smelled like corn tortilla, and Asians of course smelled like rice.

The rotting beef smell is why dogs hate blacks, by the way.

Source where I read it

Here's a pretty good account of the Holocaust as a whole from the gypsy perspective including gas chambers

https://www.amazon.com/Violins-Stopped-Playing-Story-Holocaust/dp/0531150283

I'm working through the Oxford annotated New Revised Standard Version. This version has tons of footnotes that explain the historical and literary context of the Bible. Each book has an introduction, too.

This translation is based on the KJV, but collated with ancient Hebrew and Greek editions of the Bible, so it's truer to the original sources in that respect.

Only negative to the translation is that they made generic third person pronouns (((gender neutral))) in the 1980s, but it's not too distracting.

empiricism implies that we cannot trust our brains. it eventually leads to reductionism (IMO) which implies everything can be (objectively) be boiled down to numbers as a final truth. its a very toxic and very new idea. when numbers become truth it has no other option but to turn society away from God (an atheist society is weak and foundationless) if you are really interested more about my viewpoints on this heres some reading that explains some of it better than i ever could:

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Foundations-Modern-Science/dp/0486425517


https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394703901

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525

https://www.amazon.com/Libido-Dominandi-Liberation-Political-Control/dp/1587314657 (this one is slightly less relevant but does go into how often empirical science's end goal is looking at humans as machines and how that is dehumanizing and controlling)

https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Against-Modern-World-Julius/dp/089281506X

https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Slavery-Collected-Kaczynski-k/dp/1932595805/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=11DZHECERPHPBMFXWJKR

Sorry, I was going off memory. The book was an autobiography of some reverend that hung around with him and eventually became his successor.

https://www.amazon.ca/Walls-Came-Tumbling-Down-Autobiography/dp/0060161922/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

the discovery and conquest of mexico. great book that gives first-hand accounts of how violent the aztecs were

just get this one: https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Claw-First-Half-Book/dp/0312890176/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510159372&sr=8-1&keywords=shadow+of+the+torturer

>unquantifiable discoveries

Retarded.

>predisposed vested interest

r/iamverysmart


https://www.amazon.com/Human-Accomplishment-Pursuit-Excellence-Sciences/dp/0060929642

Either buy the book or read the fucking article. You have absolutely no leg to stand on here and are literally resorting to Islamic Golden Age and Moore memes.

Lost to the West

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

• Cryptonomicon
  
• Legion of the Damned
  
• Snow Crash
  
• Daemon
  
• Ubik
  
• River of Death
  
• 20,000 Leagues
  
• Halo: The Cole Protocol
  
• Halo: Ghost of Onyx
  
• READY PLAYER ONE

Claims that gay parents are just as capable of raising children as straight parents are misrepresented. Source: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2657413
Between 24% and 90% of lesbians report being psychologically abused by their partners. Source: https://mainweb-v.musc.edu/vawprevention/lesbianrx/factsheet.shtml
Gay men are 60x more likely to have HIV than straight men. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3462414/
46% of male homosexuals report being molested, as compared to only 7% of heterosexual men. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11501300
Gays are more likely than straight people to have mental illness. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2072932/
1/4 gay men in America have had over 1000 sex partners. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Homosexualities-Study-Diversity-Among-Women/dp/0671251503
43% of gay men have over 500 partners. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Homosexualities-Study-Diversity-Among-Women/dp/0671251503
Gay men are six times more likely to commit suicide than straight men. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Opportunity-Disparities-Affecting-Bisexual/dp/0195301536
Gay men are 12x more likely to use amphetamines than straight men. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Opportunity-Disparities-Affecting-Bisexual/dp/0195301536
Gay men are 10x more likely to use heroin than straight men. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Opportunity-Disparities-Affecting-Bisexual/dp/0195301536
Liberal arguments in favor of homosexuality are based on logical fallacies. Source: http://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=clanak&id_clanak_jezik=19028&lang=en
10 to 15 percent of older homosexuals have more than 1000 sex partners. Source: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3813477
Gay people are 2-3x more likely to abuse alcohol than straight people. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Opportunity-Disparities-Affecting-Bisexual/dp/0195301536
Up to 50% of lesbians have reported sexual abuse. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9360290
79% of homosexual men say over half of their sex partners are strangers. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Opportunity-Disparities-Affecting-Bisexual/dp/0195301536
99.8% of lesbian, gay and bisexual teens will change their sexual orientation within 13 years. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26048483
Two-thirds of men and women who were homosexual change their orientation to heterosexual five years later. Source: http://psycnet.apa.org/books/11261/004
Two thirds of self-identified lesbians later have heterosexual relationships. Source: http://psycnet.apa.org/books/11261/004
Identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual does not end sexual questioning or confusion. Source: http://psycnet.apa.org/books/11261/004
One in eight gay men in London has HIV. Source: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/11/18/13-of-gay-and-bisexual-men-in-london-living-with-hiv/
Gay men are twice as likely as straight men to be in interracial relationships. Source: http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/4/1423
In Australia, 25% of homosexuals have had more than 100 sex partners. Source: http://takimag.com/article/the_straight_dope_on_homosexuality_elizabeth_mccaw/print