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annagrac's review against another edition
5.0
A well-written, nuanced look at today's political climate from a conservative/libertarian viewpoint, cunningly disguised as a Dame Edna Everage memoir.
I find Milo interesting and informative. Whether you agree with his points or not, he constructs careful, well-supported arguments and provides gratuitous entertainment at the same time.
The only thing that really annoyed me in the book is that he gives away the ending of Mean Girls. There should have been a trigger warning for that!
I find Milo interesting and informative. Whether you agree with his points or not, he constructs careful, well-supported arguments and provides gratuitous entertainment at the same time.
The only thing that really annoyed me in the book is that he gives away the ending of Mean Girls. There should have been a trigger warning for that!
bronwynmb's review against another edition
3.0
While not technically a banned book, read this for Banned Book Week 2017.
kyatic's review against another edition
1.0
Necessary disclaimers here: I don't hate Milo; I feel fairly ambivalently towards him, much the way I feel about particular species of slugs, or about tapioca pudding. I have mixed feelings about issues such as no-platforming; I think it can be both a tool for good and for censorship, depending entirely on the context and the reason. My main problem with Milo's book is not simply that he's right-wing; it's that he doesn't seem to genuinely believe anything he says. I would look upon Milo differently if I thought he were slightly more authentic than the homepage of Fashion Nova. I generally believe it's important to expose yourself to different ideas, even if the end result is just to reiterate why you disagree with them, so the existence of a book which I fundamentally disagree with isn't the issue here. I try to read books that I disagree with fairly regularly in order to better understand, challenge and affirm my own views. The issue is that I think he's hoodwinked people, and I find it very hard to respect that.
There's two things I agree with Milo on. The first is that we should listen to those with whom we disagree; I don't think we can argue against people who have opposing viewpoints to our own if we don't listen to them, because it's rather hard to take down someone's argument if you don't know what that argument actually is, which is why I put myself through reading Milo's entire book, first to blessèd last page. I would rather know what he has to say than not; how else can I be sure that it's all tripe? (Spoiler: it is.)
The second thing that we agree on is that respiration is necessary for life. At least, I assume that we agree on that. I have no idea. Maybe we don't. Maybe Milo would say that's fake news, or Leftist propaganda, or doesn't apply to Muslims.
Anyway, this book is not a manifesto. It is a twatifesto. It is page after page of nonsense claims, either unverified and lacking any kind of citation, or backed up with citations to his own website or other right wing thinkpieces. It can be summed up fairly succinctly as follows: 'I'm really hot', 'here is an unverified statement that I'm going to present as an objective, unbiased fact', 'here is a citation from my own website', 'feminists are ugly and never do the sex thing', 'I'm gay and do the sex thing all the time', and 'I say things just to be controversial, because meaning things is for feminists'. Yes, in one chapter Milo admits that he doesn't actually believe most of what he says, but says it anyway because he enjoys being 'taboo'. Great. Good. Tip top, Milo. No-one's ever been taboo before. Truly transgressive.
And when I say that our Milo is taboo and transgressive, hoo boy! You don't even know the half of it. Did you know that, according to this book, he only calls himself a 'f****t' because it upsets the 'Lefties'? It's like he's never even heard of Queer theory! Now that's transgressive; doing something to piss off an entire group of people and accidentally ending up affirming their entire way of doing things. (Hint to Milo: there's a hell of a lot of queer people who call themselves 'f****ts' in order to reclaim the term of abuse and make it their own, just as with the term 'queer' itself. You having the right to call yourself a term of your own choosing even if others find it derogatory is, in fact, exactly what those dang Lefties want. You want to really get those 'Lefties' all het up? Call yourself a Centrist. That'll do it.)
Perhaps that's being a little mean. After all, Milo really does dive deep into some pretty hefty topics in this weighty work of political nous. Some of the great philosophical questions tackled and, I think you'll agree, answered in this magnum opus include:
- are feminists lying about rape statistics and inflating them to demonise men, or are rape statistics actually incredibly high because of Muslim migration? Well, both, according to Milo. Feminists lie about rape statistics and rape culture doesn't exist, because feminists are all ugly lesbians with cats and they hate men and want them to suffer, and no-one would want to rape them anyway. But also, mass migration of Muslims to the West is causing enormous levels of rape, sometimes organised and planned in advance by groups of Muslim men as a sort of war tactic in order to take over the West through degrading their women. It's Schrodinger's rape, at once a lie when Milo wants to demonise feminists, and an objective fact when he wants to demonise Muslims. And yet Milo says that feminists are the ones who politicise rape! Eesh.
- is online harassment acceptable under the umbrella of 'trolling', i.e. free speech (Milo feels very strongly that trolling people on Twitter is the archetypal example of free speech, rather than, say, political protest) or is the prevalence of online harassment merely an attempt to silence others by crushing dissidents under the weight of Twitter campaigns and hate mobs? Well, both, according to Milo. When people on the Left bombard figures who they believe to be racist / sexist etc with angry tweets or post their personal information online, it's a case of the Left trying to shut down that person's freedom of speech. When Milo's followers send pictures of gorillas to black actresses and post the addresses of prominent feminists online, it's fine, because they have the right to do it, and it's not like it's serious! God, just get over it, guys. Unless you're doing it to a Nazi, in which case you're a disgusting SJW who needs to get off the Internet and have some sex, or something.
- is fake news a tool of the Left or the Right? Well, both, according to Milo. It's the Left who accuse the Right of fake news, because they can't stand the truth that the media outlets of the Right convey, like how Trump didn't mean he actually grabbed women by the pussy, even though he said he grabbed women by the pussy, and so the Left dub it 'fake news' to try and discredit it, and therefore to attempt to discredit the moral, honest Right in general. But also, when the Right call the Left's output 'fake news', that's accurate because the Left writes about Trump in a bad way, which makes it fake. But when the Left say 'fake news', it's wrong, and they made up the term. But the Right can use it. It's all very confusing when you try and parse out the hypocrisy of it all, but essentially, 'fake news' just means 'things that Milo doesn't agree with', which is, of course, the viewpoint of a reasoned intellectual.
- is the alt-right a hate movement full of Nazis, or is it a movement of misunderstood people who are tired of being lectured to by the morality policing Left? Well, both, according to Milo (have you noticed the pattern here yet?) When the alt-right send Nazi rhetoric or photos of swastikas to Jewish people, they're just trolling, and it's an expression of their anger at the status quo, which makes them feel ignored and downtrodden. But also, says Milo, the alt-right movement has been ambushed by Nazis. But they're not all Nazis, Milo says, except for the ones who are. Who are the Nazis, you ask? Who knows. They're there, somewhere, except for when they're not, except for when they are, which they're not. Unless they are, of course. Says Milo.
Milo has marketed this book as being too dangerous for commercial publication. It's just too degenerate for the masses, he says. He tells truths that people don't want to hear, he says. The dull truth is that this book is dangerous on only two levels, and it's not for the reasons Milo claims. Firstly, the entire reason it was dropped and ultimately self published cannot be limited to 'Milo said things about young boys which was too controversial', even if that's the main line that the press coverage of the book has taken. There are clearly other factors at play here, even beyond the genuinely abysmal writing style (which, by-the-by, reads very much like the secret Reddit history of a 15 year old boy who still thinks that the word 'butt' is the pinnacle of comedy), and these more serious issues of publication become clear when you read the text. Which I did. All of it. Every single awful page. Publishing this book would have opened Simon & Schuster up to multiple lawsuits from the people who Milo explicitly slanders, by the very basic legal definition of the term. Many claims he makes here about specific individuals, several of whom are named, are either patently inaccurate or open to dispute, and unverified, and the few claims which are cited use websites like Breitbart or, hilariously, Milo's own tweets. That insubstantial level of verification and subsequent legal threat is, quite simply, not going to fly in a book with the weight of Simon & Schuster's reputation behind it.
The other primary issue with this book is quite simply that the worldwide supply of anti-nausea drugs could never meet the demand, should this book have been allowed to obtain any semblance of a real audience. There's really only so many times one can read a variation on 'I'm hot and like to fuck... transgressively' before needing some industrial grade anti-emetics. Imagine the world health crisis. What if we all cut ourselves on all the edge? What then, Milo? Have you thought about the edge?!
And listen, in all seriousness, I don't think that Milo is evil. I really, genuinely don't. I think he's a narcissistic showoff who craves attention and validation, and I don't think he'd disagree with me on that; I think he'd probably take it as a compliment (which is part of the problem; people who wallow gloriously in the filth of their own worst qualities like they're bathing in champagne are, alas, the people who seem to shape discourse these days, and are at least 60% of the reason so many of us prefer not to engage with people online, and end up building echo chambers.) The validation that Milo seeks, however, is not validation that he is right, or even that he makes sense - he seeks assurance that yes, he is controversial, and yes, he's super duper edgy and taboo, and yes, he makes people angry. He takes people's rage at his poorly researched, inflammatory statements, and he turns it into his armour. It protects him, because if people attack what he says, which by his own admission is not a reflection of his own thought, then they are not attacking him. His ostentatiousness, his courting of controversy, his pseudo-polemicist rants - these protect him. He craves attention because it is diverting. Look at Milo the persona, the public figure, and not at the person, the man behind it all. There is probably a truly hideous self-portrait in his attic which is feeding off his soul as we speak. Milo makes a carapace of this artifice and hides himself within it, because it's the only way he knows to evade real criticism. Milo is not brave; he's afraid, and this book is not the work of a bold, silenced voice who only wants to speak the truth; it is the work of a man terrified to be authentically perceived, a man who shouts loudly about being silenced because he's afraid that no-one will listen to what he actually wants to say, which is 'please, dear God, won't someone just like me.'
This book is disingenuous to the extreme. It reads more as a man trying to convince himself of the arguments that he's making than anything else. I support freedom of speech. I'm glad that we live in a world where we're able to speak openly about what we believe. That said, I support freedom of speech primarily when people have something to say, and honestly, Milo doesn't, and he doesn't even say it - or hide it - well.
There's two things I agree with Milo on. The first is that we should listen to those with whom we disagree; I don't think we can argue against people who have opposing viewpoints to our own if we don't listen to them, because it's rather hard to take down someone's argument if you don't know what that argument actually is, which is why I put myself through reading Milo's entire book, first to blessèd last page. I would rather know what he has to say than not; how else can I be sure that it's all tripe? (Spoiler: it is.)
The second thing that we agree on is that respiration is necessary for life. At least, I assume that we agree on that. I have no idea. Maybe we don't. Maybe Milo would say that's fake news, or Leftist propaganda, or doesn't apply to Muslims.
Anyway, this book is not a manifesto. It is a twatifesto. It is page after page of nonsense claims, either unverified and lacking any kind of citation, or backed up with citations to his own website or other right wing thinkpieces. It can be summed up fairly succinctly as follows: 'I'm really hot', 'here is an unverified statement that I'm going to present as an objective, unbiased fact', 'here is a citation from my own website', 'feminists are ugly and never do the sex thing', 'I'm gay and do the sex thing all the time', and 'I say things just to be controversial, because meaning things is for feminists'. Yes, in one chapter Milo admits that he doesn't actually believe most of what he says, but says it anyway because he enjoys being 'taboo'. Great. Good. Tip top, Milo. No-one's ever been taboo before. Truly transgressive.
And when I say that our Milo is taboo and transgressive, hoo boy! You don't even know the half of it. Did you know that, according to this book, he only calls himself a 'f****t' because it upsets the 'Lefties'? It's like he's never even heard of Queer theory! Now that's transgressive; doing something to piss off an entire group of people and accidentally ending up affirming their entire way of doing things. (Hint to Milo: there's a hell of a lot of queer people who call themselves 'f****ts' in order to reclaim the term of abuse and make it their own, just as with the term 'queer' itself. You having the right to call yourself a term of your own choosing even if others find it derogatory is, in fact, exactly what those dang Lefties want. You want to really get those 'Lefties' all het up? Call yourself a Centrist. That'll do it.)
Perhaps that's being a little mean. After all, Milo really does dive deep into some pretty hefty topics in this weighty work of political nous. Some of the great philosophical questions tackled and, I think you'll agree, answered in this magnum opus include:
- are feminists lying about rape statistics and inflating them to demonise men, or are rape statistics actually incredibly high because of Muslim migration? Well, both, according to Milo. Feminists lie about rape statistics and rape culture doesn't exist, because feminists are all ugly lesbians with cats and they hate men and want them to suffer, and no-one would want to rape them anyway. But also, mass migration of Muslims to the West is causing enormous levels of rape, sometimes organised and planned in advance by groups of Muslim men as a sort of war tactic in order to take over the West through degrading their women. It's Schrodinger's rape, at once a lie when Milo wants to demonise feminists, and an objective fact when he wants to demonise Muslims. And yet Milo says that feminists are the ones who politicise rape! Eesh.
- is online harassment acceptable under the umbrella of 'trolling', i.e. free speech (Milo feels very strongly that trolling people on Twitter is the archetypal example of free speech, rather than, say, political protest) or is the prevalence of online harassment merely an attempt to silence others by crushing dissidents under the weight of Twitter campaigns and hate mobs? Well, both, according to Milo. When people on the Left bombard figures who they believe to be racist / sexist etc with angry tweets or post their personal information online, it's a case of the Left trying to shut down that person's freedom of speech. When Milo's followers send pictures of gorillas to black actresses and post the addresses of prominent feminists online, it's fine, because they have the right to do it, and it's not like it's serious! God, just get over it, guys. Unless you're doing it to a Nazi, in which case you're a disgusting SJW who needs to get off the Internet and have some sex, or something.
- is fake news a tool of the Left or the Right? Well, both, according to Milo. It's the Left who accuse the Right of fake news, because they can't stand the truth that the media outlets of the Right convey, like how Trump didn't mean he actually grabbed women by the pussy, even though he said he grabbed women by the pussy, and so the Left dub it 'fake news' to try and discredit it, and therefore to attempt to discredit the moral, honest Right in general. But also, when the Right call the Left's output 'fake news', that's accurate because the Left writes about Trump in a bad way, which makes it fake. But when the Left say 'fake news', it's wrong, and they made up the term. But the Right can use it. It's all very confusing when you try and parse out the hypocrisy of it all, but essentially, 'fake news' just means 'things that Milo doesn't agree with', which is, of course, the viewpoint of a reasoned intellectual.
- is the alt-right a hate movement full of Nazis, or is it a movement of misunderstood people who are tired of being lectured to by the morality policing Left? Well, both, according to Milo (have you noticed the pattern here yet?) When the alt-right send Nazi rhetoric or photos of swastikas to Jewish people, they're just trolling, and it's an expression of their anger at the status quo, which makes them feel ignored and downtrodden. But also, says Milo, the alt-right movement has been ambushed by Nazis. But they're not all Nazis, Milo says, except for the ones who are. Who are the Nazis, you ask? Who knows. They're there, somewhere, except for when they're not, except for when they are, which they're not. Unless they are, of course. Says Milo.
Milo has marketed this book as being too dangerous for commercial publication. It's just too degenerate for the masses, he says. He tells truths that people don't want to hear, he says. The dull truth is that this book is dangerous on only two levels, and it's not for the reasons Milo claims. Firstly, the entire reason it was dropped and ultimately self published cannot be limited to 'Milo said things about young boys which was too controversial', even if that's the main line that the press coverage of the book has taken. There are clearly other factors at play here, even beyond the genuinely abysmal writing style (which, by-the-by, reads very much like the secret Reddit history of a 15 year old boy who still thinks that the word 'butt' is the pinnacle of comedy), and these more serious issues of publication become clear when you read the text. Which I did. All of it. Every single awful page. Publishing this book would have opened Simon & Schuster up to multiple lawsuits from the people who Milo explicitly slanders, by the very basic legal definition of the term. Many claims he makes here about specific individuals, several of whom are named, are either patently inaccurate or open to dispute, and unverified, and the few claims which are cited use websites like Breitbart or, hilariously, Milo's own tweets. That insubstantial level of verification and subsequent legal threat is, quite simply, not going to fly in a book with the weight of Simon & Schuster's reputation behind it.
The other primary issue with this book is quite simply that the worldwide supply of anti-nausea drugs could never meet the demand, should this book have been allowed to obtain any semblance of a real audience. There's really only so many times one can read a variation on 'I'm hot and like to fuck... transgressively' before needing some industrial grade anti-emetics. Imagine the world health crisis. What if we all cut ourselves on all the edge? What then, Milo? Have you thought about the edge?!
And listen, in all seriousness, I don't think that Milo is evil. I really, genuinely don't. I think he's a narcissistic showoff who craves attention and validation, and I don't think he'd disagree with me on that; I think he'd probably take it as a compliment (which is part of the problem; people who wallow gloriously in the filth of their own worst qualities like they're bathing in champagne are, alas, the people who seem to shape discourse these days, and are at least 60% of the reason so many of us prefer not to engage with people online, and end up building echo chambers.) The validation that Milo seeks, however, is not validation that he is right, or even that he makes sense - he seeks assurance that yes, he is controversial, and yes, he's super duper edgy and taboo, and yes, he makes people angry. He takes people's rage at his poorly researched, inflammatory statements, and he turns it into his armour. It protects him, because if people attack what he says, which by his own admission is not a reflection of his own thought, then they are not attacking him. His ostentatiousness, his courting of controversy, his pseudo-polemicist rants - these protect him. He craves attention because it is diverting. Look at Milo the persona, the public figure, and not at the person, the man behind it all. There is probably a truly hideous self-portrait in his attic which is feeding off his soul as we speak. Milo makes a carapace of this artifice and hides himself within it, because it's the only way he knows to evade real criticism. Milo is not brave; he's afraid, and this book is not the work of a bold, silenced voice who only wants to speak the truth; it is the work of a man terrified to be authentically perceived, a man who shouts loudly about being silenced because he's afraid that no-one will listen to what he actually wants to say, which is 'please, dear God, won't someone just like me.'
This book is disingenuous to the extreme. It reads more as a man trying to convince himself of the arguments that he's making than anything else. I support freedom of speech. I'm glad that we live in a world where we're able to speak openly about what we believe. That said, I support freedom of speech primarily when people have something to say, and honestly, Milo doesn't, and he doesn't even say it - or hide it - well.
enyanyo's review
2.0
I found it hard to overlook the narcissism, generalisations and unnecessary nastiness. However, the sometimes makes good points about the hypocrisy of left, political correctness and feminism.
taliesien's review against another edition
5.0
Definitely funnier in Milo's voice. The only niggle I had was his rapid fire speech pattern but having read the book previously I was able to discern what was being said without having to rewind and listen again during the hyper sections. I was almost sorry to finish mowing today before I had finished listening. :D
rkapil7's review against another edition
5.0
He dazzles! Never a fan of him - his breitbart articles looked hateful thrash, after reading the book I'm still not a fan of his way of triggering people for the sake of it even if it means using racist slurs. But after reading the book you know that he really is just a culturally anti-establishment alt-right - but his anti-establishment position seems justified sometimes - like exposing left's hypocrisy over skewed priorities or being anti-science or appeasing the minorities for emotions. Like you will be surprised by his care for the black poverty but at the same time not shying away from black crime stats. His demand for free speech, his statement 'emotions do not trump facts' looks all justified. He does have an intellectual depth when he discusses frankfurt school in progressive left chapter or mentions Ayn Rand throughout the book as the pillar behind his conservativeness. In the gamers section he explains the cultural phenomenon of saying outrageous words without meaning it, his way of going after trolling just to piss off SJWs even if he doesn't mean it.
There is an undercurrent of alt politics counterculture and this fabulous faggot is its poster boy! A must read.
There is an undercurrent of alt politics counterculture and this fabulous faggot is its poster boy! A must read.
idiotdoll's review against another edition
3.0
This book promises to be your red-pill, but I'd say it's just an anti-blue-pill.
Milo doesn't really say why you should believe what he believes in, he says why you shouldn't believe what left believes in.
And Milo clearly suffers from self-excelence and self-importance syndrome. What he does is important, yet he thinks too much of himself
The book didn't really make me rethink my views on anything but one thing: methods that is used by Milo and rest of republicans.
An interesting read for me, I enjoyed reading it a lot, yet feels useless
Milo doesn't really say why you should believe what he believes in, he says why you shouldn't believe what left believes in.
And Milo clearly suffers from self-excelence and self-importance syndrome. What he does is important, yet he thinks too much of himself
The book didn't really make me rethink my views on anything but one thing: methods that is used by Milo and rest of republicans.
An interesting read for me, I enjoyed reading it a lot, yet feels useless