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726 reviews
Careful, Beauties Ahead: My Year with the Ultra-Orthodox by Tuvia Tenenbom
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Careful, Beauties Ahead
5/5 stars
"A 555-page slow, gentle roast of Israeli Haredim."
*******
Verdict: Recommended! I see why the price is so high.
*******
Whatever this guy is, he is not stupid. He seems to speak/write multiple languages. Hebrew and Yiddish natively. And then German--not that far from Yiddish-- well enough to write books in that language (for some number of years he lived there); and finally, English, well enough to write plays and books.
He writes perceptive gonzo journalism-- in his third language--in a very folksy style ("That's life, and so it goes on, and ain't nobody going to change the course it takes.") He is most certainly a glutton (He eats so much that my A1c went up by full point just reading the book). He also seems to be an aesthete (He is generous with his observations about how nice looking somebody is / is not. Such as the ugly non-binary Progressives of America).
There are a total of 92 short stories / vignettes here over 555 pages. That works out to about 6.03 pages each, and the whole thing takes on a certain ineffable quality. (I really did try to find the word, but just can't.)
It ends abruptly right at October the 7th.
It seems that the author used to be a Hasid many decades ago in his life, and he returned to see how the neighborhood had changed.
It's not that he dislikes the people (I would say that he is actually fond of them), and he skewers them ever so gently in his folksy style.
It is wondrous to this reader that under Jewish sovereignty (and the absence of a foreign sovereign) that the first thing Jews set about doing is torturing one another; dealing with Iran / Hamas/ Arabs is small potatoes compared to dealing with 1 million Haredim--at least if you read between the lines of this book.
In fact, the former may be easier than the latter.
I have chosen about 50-some-odd quotes from the book to give you a flavor of it because:
1. It's probably easier to show what (I think) are the Greatest Hits of the book than to try to tell he reader of this review about the feel of it.
2. The events described in this are so bizarre that any reader might believe only direct quotes.
Read as many (or all) of the quotes as you like.
Other books by the same author:
1. I Sleep in H*****'s Room
2. Catch the Jew!
3. The Lies They Tell
4. Hello, Refugees!
5. The Taming of the Jew
6. Careful, Beauties Ahead!
*******
Quotes
(30, in a Haredi neighborhood) Passage for dogs and Zionists is totally forbidden.
(30) Legend has it that there are more opposing groups in Mea Shearim than people.... since the destruction of the Second Temple, there have been more Jewish leaders in the land of Israel than cats.
(35) Litvacks... Love to study, dress simpler than the Hasidim, sing for up to 4 minutes, and collect prohibitions of all kinds because the more that is forbidden, the better it is for their psyche. Sephardim love everything mystical, whatever mysticism means, and dream of catching a Litvak for a spouse, even if that Litvak is sick, ugly, fat, old, or has slight brain damage.
(222) Bottom line, and as strange as it sounds: the very people who have made an oath to dedicate their lives to the Torah, be they Litvacks or Hasids, have no clue what the Torah says.
(219) Do angels get married to one another? Do angels have matchmakers? Does an angel wear white socks or black socks? Do angels serve their beds? Do they do it in the dark? Can I sneak into their bedrooms to see how they do it? Is the average angel a Hasidic or a Litvak?
(217) Moses the Lawgiver, in case you wonder, also wore a shtreimel.
(213) The history of Jews in the diaspora is soaked in blood, Jewish blood, be it York or Rome, Warsaw or Berlin, Bucharest or Kiev. There, the Jews were slaughtered and raped, and yet they celebrate those very lands, cities, towns, and villages as if those places were paradise on Earth, as if Satmar and Belz were holy names.
(210) I hope The Tikvah Fund pays him a heavy salary, because, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with such a set of sentences as he did if you put a gun to my face. Rabbi Pfeffer is a nice guy otherwise; he's just a Litvak.
(208) You've got to be a Litvak to talk like this, let me tell you.
(205) A Rebbe, in other words, is like health insurance, only much cheaper.
(180) It's incredible to watch the proceedings here: these Hasidim, known to be anti-Zionists, can visit the grave of their Rebbe only because the Zionist police, otherwise known as the "Nazi police," risk their lives for them.
(167) She doesn't want that everybody will know that her soon to be daughter-in-law is a Sephardic. Yes, her son is divorced, and who but a Sephardi, or maybe a convert's daughter, would marry him, but why advertise all over the world that her daughter-in-law is a Sephardi?
(161) We are Litvaks, not Hasidim, and we don't eat kugels.
(160) They don't have a clue about singing. They try, but they fail miserably. This family, I quickly learn, is Litvak, not Hasidic.
(151) An older Sephardi Man looks at me, a man of white skin and suspenders, an item he doesn't encounter often. "Are you," he asks me, an Ashkenazi or a Jew?" To him, white-skinned Jews don't exist. At maximum, people like me are Germans, like creatures walking the streets of Prenzlauer Berg.
(144) God, how strange, even likes converts. Perhaps, I'm not sure, we should get the Modesty Guard involved and teach God a lesson once and for all.
(143) An ordinary Haredi Man will never marry a Sephardi woman unless he has cancer and his days are numbered, but a dead Sephardi's book [Shulchan Aruch] is held in such high esteem.
(138) The Sephardim, Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries, usually cannot marry any Ashkenazi either, unless the Ashkenazi is sick, ugly, very old, or an Ashkenazi who comes from parents who are converts.
(136) Yes, there are those who believe what they read in Sabbath bulletins, and those who believe what they read in the secular media. These two are a perfect match, I think, and they should marry one another.
(105) To Reb Israel Meir--I see a pattern--everything is somewhere high up beyond the clouds, in the ether, except for the Zionists, who are always here.
(75) The Jewish agency people offered to smuggle him and others of his community out of Romania in into the soon to be formed state of Israel. He refused. "I would rather be with the Nazis," he said to them "than with the Zionists." When the fascists and Nazis finally arrived at the gate of his town, he welcomed them with bread and salt, the way kings were once welcomed when entering a city. In response, they emptied their bullets on his head, took those of his children who were in town to the nearby Râut River, threw them into the water, making sure they drowned to death, then shot his wife, the mother of the drowned children. His daughter, my mother, never forgave the Zionists for the Nazis' crimes.
(75) Makes sense? No. Man's reality is rarely logic's best friend.
(42) For the most part, the "Taliban" Jewish are newly religious women who, in their past, slept with everybody and walked in bikinis on the streets. Now that they are religious, they cover their bodies as much as possible, believing that this new dress code will purify their sinful bodies.
(313) I'm seated at the [Reform, female] rabbi's sukkah, which in this case is a bit of a depressing place, and the food at the table, may I say, is fit for flies and rats. It has very little taste, if at all, though it's healthy.... Do you want gefilte fish? They have little bites of it, but it tastes like a reformed gefilte fish, nothing any Jew from Mea Shearim would even recognize.
(310) The clock on the wall shows 1 hour earlier than it is. "This is Jordanian time," one Hasid explains to me, "because We don't use Zionist time." These Jews, don't you know, are Jordanians. I checked the time in Amman on my iPhone, and it's the same as in Jerusalem. But who cares? It sounds good, creative, and a bit anti Zionist.
(301) The Rebbe gives a sermon. His manner of speaking is monotonic; This man doesn't get easily excited in life, I think. The ideas he presents in his sermon are almost none. It seems that he doesn't have much to say, and this is not lost on the Hasidim, about half of whom start yawning..... To them, it seems, the Rebbe can do no wrong, even if he's boring them to death.
(286, Ger Hasidim) The Rebbe said that having intimate relations is an ugly part of life, but nature is not perfect, and this is the only way to get children. "I can sleep with my wife twice a month, at a maximum," he said, " and I should never call her by name."
(267-book is set in Jerusalem) When the prayer service is done, Yom Kippur is over. Gone. Done. When this happens, everybody sings "Next year, in Jerusalem," as if we were in Singapore right now.
(249) If you give a donation to an organization called Vaad Harabbonim, the Board of Rabbis, you will have a good year ahead, I read on a big poster hanging there Sabbath Square, signed by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky. I was under the impression that God decided life and death issues, but perhaps I was wrong. If this poster is correct, the one deciding these issues is Chaim Kanievsky, not God.
(239) What do I see? A prayer called Tikkun Keri, repairing or rectifying the soul from the damage spilled by seed. Lots of men in the area, it seems, are extra busy spilling their seed. Mea Shearim, let me tell you, is packed with stallions.
(325) Rabbi Berland said "The Tzaddik is not a person at all. He is the Holy One Blessed Be He Himself who descends in the form of a man."
(328) David Batsri is a man I've met more than once, and I know him to be a crook who squeezes thousands of shekels from the poorest of people, promising them to "repair their souls" ....... He tells them that unless they pay him and his son [sic] exuberant sums of money, they will burn for eternity in boiling excrement in hell.
(335) -"When you give a Rebbe money, it gives him the power to help you.
-How?
-"How? This I don't know.
(349) ..."Guide To The Perplexed," I was told that such was forbidden. Then as now, it seems, Haredi Judaism toils hard not to grasp what its faith is.
(358) 30 minutes pass before two police squads finally show up. "Nazis!" Some of the [Haredi] kids shout at an approaching bus, obviously believing that the Egged drivers were the ones who murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Go prove otherwise.
(377) The Rebbe said "In Poland, the Ger Court didn't have classes, and we don't need them here either."
-No classes? How are the students studying in the Ger institutions?
-They study without classes. They recite the Talmud, page after page after page after page. No analysis of anything.
(380) If I understand this man right, at this very moment, The Rebbe is squeezing his testicles, and he tries to be less critical of the Holy Squeezer.
(389) In an article about the wealthiest rabbis in Israel..... The Belzer Rebbe's estimated worth was 180 million shekels, the Gerer Rebbe's, 350 million shekels, and Rabbi David Abuhatzeira's, 750 million shekels.
(399) Some of these ba'alei Teshuva are former convicts, prone to violence, and at times when they encounter a Haredi Man with a smartphone, they beat the hell out of him.
(401) Some of the Sephardim I chatted with threw in Yiddish words here and there. But the Yiddish they tried to speak was so bad, it was painful to listen.
(411) Did Jews cover their heads with a skullcap in Talmudic times? Not really. A few individuals might have, but the rest of the Jews did not. In fact, as late as the 18th century, such a custom not exist.
(421) These lines are totally convincing when said in Yiddish. In other languages, what this Rebbe just said means the following: all the stories about the Rebbes who have performed miracles are as accurate as any of the tales in "1001 Nights."
(442) Soon enough, a rabbi shows up. He looks at me as one would look at a camel inside a brothel, wondering what a creature like me is doing in a holy place like this.
(451) Do American or European progressors make any sense? If they believe, as they say, that everyone is entitled to their opinion, why can't they tolerate anyone who disagrees with them?
(475) I get off the bus and walk on foot; it's faster. And what do I see? Almost everywhere I walk, I see trash, be it on the streets or in the fronts of many houses, that no garbage truck will collect because it's all over. I'm ashamed for the people living in this city [Bnei Barak]. Do the inhabitants here have no sense of aesthetics?
(500) The guard was beating Akiva in the face, very hard, boom, boom, and the Hasidim were standing around, she told me, cheering him on. They clapped and said: " Beautiful, beautiful. Finish him off!" [This is over a split within the dynasty.]
(501) If I remember correctly, Mormons believe that God was once a man. Ger Hasidim believe comment if I get this right, that a man is God.
(510) This Litvak is a kolelnik, or avreh, a married man who studies in a Yeshiva, and he seems to enjoy his involvement in this story. He has no job, so he has plenty of time on his hands...... A man like him cherishes some action in life, any action. And dealing with the issue of a non-married Yeshiva student wishing to move to another Yeshiva is godsend. He'll squeeze every drop out of it and get ever more rap eyes involved, which will keep him busy for at least a week or a month, whichever comes first.
(522) He sings a few more Hasidic tunes and tells me that their origin is in the Hungarian Gypsy csárdás [tavern] music. Yes, my pure, sacred, and holy Hasidic music comes from Hungarian pub. Yes, the roots of Jewish soul go all the way to Gypsy land.
(525) When the facade moves away, he walks backward. You never, my dear, show your behind to Der Heilige [The Rebbe].
(532) The term "anusim," is now used in Israel for Jews born in the Haredi world who a part of it but no longer believe in God. They still practice the religion, not out of faith but out of fear.
(534) My Ger marriage guide told me before I got married that when I have intimate relations with my husband, I should imagine the Rebbe.
(540) Hundreds of hoseidon start chasing followers of Rabbi Shaul.... They do much more than Chase. They beat them so severely that some of the injured require immediate medical care, even a hospital.
(547) God is more like an afterthought, while the rabbis are supreme, the first in line of holiness.
(548) If you have the right pedigree, if you come from a rabbinical family, your life will be full of honey. Otherwise, may God help you. Oy to you, my dear, if you are Sephardi, oy to you if you are a convert, and oy to you if you are severely wounded Secular Jew lying down on the street in urgent need a medical care on the Sabbath.
Careful, Beauties Ahead
5/5 stars
"A 555-page slow, gentle roast of Israeli Haredim."
*******
Verdict: Recommended! I see why the price is so high.
*******
Whatever this guy is, he is not stupid. He seems to speak/write multiple languages. Hebrew and Yiddish natively. And then German--not that far from Yiddish-- well enough to write books in that language (for some number of years he lived there); and finally, English, well enough to write plays and books.
He writes perceptive gonzo journalism-- in his third language--in a very folksy style ("That's life, and so it goes on, and ain't nobody going to change the course it takes.") He is most certainly a glutton (He eats so much that my A1c went up by full point just reading the book). He also seems to be an aesthete (He is generous with his observations about how nice looking somebody is / is not. Such as the ugly non-binary Progressives of America).
There are a total of 92 short stories / vignettes here over 555 pages. That works out to about 6.03 pages each, and the whole thing takes on a certain ineffable quality. (I really did try to find the word, but just can't.)
It ends abruptly right at October the 7th.
It seems that the author used to be a Hasid many decades ago in his life, and he returned to see how the neighborhood had changed.
It's not that he dislikes the people (I would say that he is actually fond of them), and he skewers them ever so gently in his folksy style.
It is wondrous to this reader that under Jewish sovereignty (and the absence of a foreign sovereign) that the first thing Jews set about doing is torturing one another; dealing with Iran / Hamas/ Arabs is small potatoes compared to dealing with 1 million Haredim--at least if you read between the lines of this book.
In fact, the former may be easier than the latter.
I have chosen about 50-some-odd quotes from the book to give you a flavor of it because:
1. It's probably easier to show what (I think) are the Greatest Hits of the book than to try to tell he reader of this review about the feel of it.
2. The events described in this are so bizarre that any reader might believe only direct quotes.
Read as many (or all) of the quotes as you like.
Other books by the same author:
1. I Sleep in H*****'s Room
2. Catch the Jew!
3. The Lies They Tell
4. Hello, Refugees!
5. The Taming of the Jew
6. Careful, Beauties Ahead!
*******
Quotes
(30, in a Haredi neighborhood) Passage for dogs and Zionists is totally forbidden.
(30) Legend has it that there are more opposing groups in Mea Shearim than people.... since the destruction of the Second Temple, there have been more Jewish leaders in the land of Israel than cats.
(35) Litvacks... Love to study, dress simpler than the Hasidim, sing for up to 4 minutes, and collect prohibitions of all kinds because the more that is forbidden, the better it is for their psyche. Sephardim love everything mystical, whatever mysticism means, and dream of catching a Litvak for a spouse, even if that Litvak is sick, ugly, fat, old, or has slight brain damage.
(222) Bottom line, and as strange as it sounds: the very people who have made an oath to dedicate their lives to the Torah, be they Litvacks or Hasids, have no clue what the Torah says.
(219) Do angels get married to one another? Do angels have matchmakers? Does an angel wear white socks or black socks? Do angels serve their beds? Do they do it in the dark? Can I sneak into their bedrooms to see how they do it? Is the average angel a Hasidic or a Litvak?
(217) Moses the Lawgiver, in case you wonder, also wore a shtreimel.
(213) The history of Jews in the diaspora is soaked in blood, Jewish blood, be it York or Rome, Warsaw or Berlin, Bucharest or Kiev. There, the Jews were slaughtered and raped, and yet they celebrate those very lands, cities, towns, and villages as if those places were paradise on Earth, as if Satmar and Belz were holy names.
(210) I hope The Tikvah Fund pays him a heavy salary, because, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with such a set of sentences as he did if you put a gun to my face. Rabbi Pfeffer is a nice guy otherwise; he's just a Litvak.
(208) You've got to be a Litvak to talk like this, let me tell you.
(205) A Rebbe, in other words, is like health insurance, only much cheaper.
(180) It's incredible to watch the proceedings here: these Hasidim, known to be anti-Zionists, can visit the grave of their Rebbe only because the Zionist police, otherwise known as the "Nazi police," risk their lives for them.
(167) She doesn't want that everybody will know that her soon to be daughter-in-law is a Sephardic. Yes, her son is divorced, and who but a Sephardi, or maybe a convert's daughter, would marry him, but why advertise all over the world that her daughter-in-law is a Sephardi?
(161) We are Litvaks, not Hasidim, and we don't eat kugels.
(160) They don't have a clue about singing. They try, but they fail miserably. This family, I quickly learn, is Litvak, not Hasidic.
(151) An older Sephardi Man looks at me, a man of white skin and suspenders, an item he doesn't encounter often. "Are you," he asks me, an Ashkenazi or a Jew?" To him, white-skinned Jews don't exist. At maximum, people like me are Germans, like creatures walking the streets of Prenzlauer Berg.
(144) God, how strange, even likes converts. Perhaps, I'm not sure, we should get the Modesty Guard involved and teach God a lesson once and for all.
(143) An ordinary Haredi Man will never marry a Sephardi woman unless he has cancer and his days are numbered, but a dead Sephardi's book [Shulchan Aruch] is held in such high esteem.
(138) The Sephardim, Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries, usually cannot marry any Ashkenazi either, unless the Ashkenazi is sick, ugly, very old, or an Ashkenazi who comes from parents who are converts.
(136) Yes, there are those who believe what they read in Sabbath bulletins, and those who believe what they read in the secular media. These two are a perfect match, I think, and they should marry one another.
(105) To Reb Israel Meir--I see a pattern--everything is somewhere high up beyond the clouds, in the ether, except for the Zionists, who are always here.
(75) The Jewish agency people offered to smuggle him and others of his community out of Romania in into the soon to be formed state of Israel. He refused. "I would rather be with the Nazis," he said to them "than with the Zionists." When the fascists and Nazis finally arrived at the gate of his town, he welcomed them with bread and salt, the way kings were once welcomed when entering a city. In response, they emptied their bullets on his head, took those of his children who were in town to the nearby Râut River, threw them into the water, making sure they drowned to death, then shot his wife, the mother of the drowned children. His daughter, my mother, never forgave the Zionists for the Nazis' crimes.
(75) Makes sense? No. Man's reality is rarely logic's best friend.
(42) For the most part, the "Taliban" Jewish are newly religious women who, in their past, slept with everybody and walked in bikinis on the streets. Now that they are religious, they cover their bodies as much as possible, believing that this new dress code will purify their sinful bodies.
(313) I'm seated at the [Reform, female] rabbi's sukkah, which in this case is a bit of a depressing place, and the food at the table, may I say, is fit for flies and rats. It has very little taste, if at all, though it's healthy.... Do you want gefilte fish? They have little bites of it, but it tastes like a reformed gefilte fish, nothing any Jew from Mea Shearim would even recognize.
(310) The clock on the wall shows 1 hour earlier than it is. "This is Jordanian time," one Hasid explains to me, "because We don't use Zionist time." These Jews, don't you know, are Jordanians. I checked the time in Amman on my iPhone, and it's the same as in Jerusalem. But who cares? It sounds good, creative, and a bit anti Zionist.
(301) The Rebbe gives a sermon. His manner of speaking is monotonic; This man doesn't get easily excited in life, I think. The ideas he presents in his sermon are almost none. It seems that he doesn't have much to say, and this is not lost on the Hasidim, about half of whom start yawning..... To them, it seems, the Rebbe can do no wrong, even if he's boring them to death.
(286, Ger Hasidim) The Rebbe said that having intimate relations is an ugly part of life, but nature is not perfect, and this is the only way to get children. "I can sleep with my wife twice a month, at a maximum," he said, " and I should never call her by name."
(267-book is set in Jerusalem) When the prayer service is done, Yom Kippur is over. Gone. Done. When this happens, everybody sings "Next year, in Jerusalem," as if we were in Singapore right now.
(249) If you give a donation to an organization called Vaad Harabbonim, the Board of Rabbis, you will have a good year ahead, I read on a big poster hanging there Sabbath Square, signed by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky. I was under the impression that God decided life and death issues, but perhaps I was wrong. If this poster is correct, the one deciding these issues is Chaim Kanievsky, not God.
(239) What do I see? A prayer called Tikkun Keri, repairing or rectifying the soul from the damage spilled by seed. Lots of men in the area, it seems, are extra busy spilling their seed. Mea Shearim, let me tell you, is packed with stallions.
(325) Rabbi Berland said "The Tzaddik is not a person at all. He is the Holy One Blessed Be He Himself who descends in the form of a man."
(328) David Batsri is a man I've met more than once, and I know him to be a crook who squeezes thousands of shekels from the poorest of people, promising them to "repair their souls" ....... He tells them that unless they pay him and his son [sic] exuberant sums of money, they will burn for eternity in boiling excrement in hell.
(335) -"When you give a Rebbe money, it gives him the power to help you.
-How?
-"How? This I don't know.
(349) ..."Guide To The Perplexed," I was told that such was forbidden. Then as now, it seems, Haredi Judaism toils hard not to grasp what its faith is.
(358) 30 minutes pass before two police squads finally show up. "Nazis!" Some of the [Haredi] kids shout at an approaching bus, obviously believing that the Egged drivers were the ones who murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Go prove otherwise.
(377) The Rebbe said "In Poland, the Ger Court didn't have classes, and we don't need them here either."
-No classes? How are the students studying in the Ger institutions?
-They study without classes. They recite the Talmud, page after page after page after page. No analysis of anything.
(380) If I understand this man right, at this very moment, The Rebbe is squeezing his testicles, and he tries to be less critical of the Holy Squeezer.
(389) In an article about the wealthiest rabbis in Israel..... The Belzer Rebbe's estimated worth was 180 million shekels, the Gerer Rebbe's, 350 million shekels, and Rabbi David Abuhatzeira's, 750 million shekels.
(399) Some of these ba'alei Teshuva are former convicts, prone to violence, and at times when they encounter a Haredi Man with a smartphone, they beat the hell out of him.
(401) Some of the Sephardim I chatted with threw in Yiddish words here and there. But the Yiddish they tried to speak was so bad, it was painful to listen.
(411) Did Jews cover their heads with a skullcap in Talmudic times? Not really. A few individuals might have, but the rest of the Jews did not. In fact, as late as the 18th century, such a custom not exist.
(421) These lines are totally convincing when said in Yiddish. In other languages, what this Rebbe just said means the following: all the stories about the Rebbes who have performed miracles are as accurate as any of the tales in "1001 Nights."
(442) Soon enough, a rabbi shows up. He looks at me as one would look at a camel inside a brothel, wondering what a creature like me is doing in a holy place like this.
(451) Do American or European progressors make any sense? If they believe, as they say, that everyone is entitled to their opinion, why can't they tolerate anyone who disagrees with them?
(475) I get off the bus and walk on foot; it's faster. And what do I see? Almost everywhere I walk, I see trash, be it on the streets or in the fronts of many houses, that no garbage truck will collect because it's all over. I'm ashamed for the people living in this city [Bnei Barak]. Do the inhabitants here have no sense of aesthetics?
(500) The guard was beating Akiva in the face, very hard, boom, boom, and the Hasidim were standing around, she told me, cheering him on. They clapped and said: " Beautiful, beautiful. Finish him off!" [This is over a split within the dynasty.]
(501) If I remember correctly, Mormons believe that God was once a man. Ger Hasidim believe comment if I get this right, that a man is God.
(510) This Litvak is a kolelnik, or avreh, a married man who studies in a Yeshiva, and he seems to enjoy his involvement in this story. He has no job, so he has plenty of time on his hands...... A man like him cherishes some action in life, any action. And dealing with the issue of a non-married Yeshiva student wishing to move to another Yeshiva is godsend. He'll squeeze every drop out of it and get ever more rap eyes involved, which will keep him busy for at least a week or a month, whichever comes first.
(522) He sings a few more Hasidic tunes and tells me that their origin is in the Hungarian Gypsy csárdás [tavern] music. Yes, my pure, sacred, and holy Hasidic music comes from Hungarian pub. Yes, the roots of Jewish soul go all the way to Gypsy land.
(525) When the facade moves away, he walks backward. You never, my dear, show your behind to Der Heilige [The Rebbe].
(532) The term "anusim," is now used in Israel for Jews born in the Haredi world who a part of it but no longer believe in God. They still practice the religion, not out of faith but out of fear.
(534) My Ger marriage guide told me before I got married that when I have intimate relations with my husband, I should imagine the Rebbe.
(540) Hundreds of hoseidon start chasing followers of Rabbi Shaul.... They do much more than Chase. They beat them so severely that some of the injured require immediate medical care, even a hospital.
(547) God is more like an afterthought, while the rabbis are supreme, the first in line of holiness.
(548) If you have the right pedigree, if you come from a rabbinical family, your life will be full of honey. Otherwise, may God help you. Oy to you, my dear, if you are Sephardi, oy to you if you are a convert, and oy to you if you are severely wounded Secular Jew lying down on the street in urgent need a medical care on the Sabbath.
He's Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It by Bob Berkowitz, Susan Yager-Berkowitz
informative
medium-paced
3.0
Book Review
3/5
"Not much value added; nice that someone compiled it."
The first big caveat is that the data here were gathered by survey, which is a notoriously unreliable method of data collection because of self-selection biases.
That said: There are lots of cases here, but I think that the same as “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” it's easy to imagine that "sexually satisfied couples are all alike, and sexually dissatisfied ones are all dissatisfied in their own way."
It has also been said that "Proximity kills sexual desire faster than fainting." (David Buss book.)
Marriage is the ultimate proximate situation, and nobody has to wonder why sex stops after marriage.
One situation that can happen (that was not dealt with in this book) is the case where the husband has an active sexual past and when he gets married he must learn to live with one woman.
I've talked to a lot of guys who are professional "mongers," and they say that they could never imagine being married to someone and not bored out of their mind after one year.
Others have said that their interest in a woman only lasts about 2 hours.
And it does make sense, because when you see people that are celebrities (who have access to unlimited amounts of trim), the minority trajectory is to have all children with one person.
-Ray Charles had 12 kids by 9 women, but he couldn't stay married.
-Prince had hundreds of women in his life, but zero children and he couldn't seem to make one marriage work.
-Rollo Tomassi claims to have a body count of 40, but only one child.
-The 21 NFL players with the most children have 141 between all of them (6.7 per man) with a total of 78 women (The average man has children with 3.7 women, and the average woman has 1.8 children.)
So it is clear that even independent of children, sexual variety is preferred and monogamy is not a natural state.
But then.....
I think scientists have found out that the dopamine / oxytocin effects from being in love top out at 2 years.
So, getting married and staying with one person for 30 years is probably a good way to be sexually bored for 15 or 20 of them.
So, with these things all known, are all of these stories ineluctable catch 22s?
CHOICE 1:
After you have sex with everybody that you want to and deal with the difficulty of settling down with one.
CHOICE 2:
You DO do it the right way and get ready to be bored out of your mind at some point?
One possibility that was not explored in this book at any length is that of an open marriage. (That book was written by Jenny Block and is entitled "Open.")
But, in real life, the danger that I have seen with that is that the person ends up leaving their spouse for the one with whom they have more sexual attraction - - even if it is only transient.
The approach to marriage that I have seen that works best is the Orthodox Jewish / Muslim / Mormon type way.
In the first (which I am), People only have two weeks out of every month available for sexual activity and they do not interact with / touch any woman who is not their wife. (Some men go a little bit further, and they will not even make eye contact with a woman who is not their wife or look at another woman.)
This life also goes with no television and a generally very regimented existence.
But, as evidenced by the fact that the average Orthodox house has about 5.5 children, it does seem that regular sex is a thing.
Is that worth it to most people?
As was mentioned in the book, sex is only 3% of a marriage.
Verdict: I might recommend this book at no more than the price of $5. I doubt that I will be rereading it, because I doubt that I will be keeping it.
The more suitable style for this might have been something like the Hite report or the Kinsey report: More time spent on quoting interviews at length than therapeutic speculation.
Quote ("Beautiful Stranger"): "Show me a beautiful woman and I'll show you a man that's tired of *beeping* her. "
3/5
"Not much value added; nice that someone compiled it."
The first big caveat is that the data here were gathered by survey, which is a notoriously unreliable method of data collection because of self-selection biases.
That said: There are lots of cases here, but I think that the same as “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” it's easy to imagine that "sexually satisfied couples are all alike, and sexually dissatisfied ones are all dissatisfied in their own way."
It has also been said that "Proximity kills sexual desire faster than fainting." (David Buss book.)
Marriage is the ultimate proximate situation, and nobody has to wonder why sex stops after marriage.
One situation that can happen (that was not dealt with in this book) is the case where the husband has an active sexual past and when he gets married he must learn to live with one woman.
I've talked to a lot of guys who are professional "mongers," and they say that they could never imagine being married to someone and not bored out of their mind after one year.
Others have said that their interest in a woman only lasts about 2 hours.
And it does make sense, because when you see people that are celebrities (who have access to unlimited amounts of trim), the minority trajectory is to have all children with one person.
-Ray Charles had 12 kids by 9 women, but he couldn't stay married.
-Prince had hundreds of women in his life, but zero children and he couldn't seem to make one marriage work.
-Rollo Tomassi claims to have a body count of 40, but only one child.
-The 21 NFL players with the most children have 141 between all of them (6.7 per man) with a total of 78 women (The average man has children with 3.7 women, and the average woman has 1.8 children.)
So it is clear that even independent of children, sexual variety is preferred and monogamy is not a natural state.
But then.....
I think scientists have found out that the dopamine / oxytocin effects from being in love top out at 2 years.
So, getting married and staying with one person for 30 years is probably a good way to be sexually bored for 15 or 20 of them.
So, with these things all known, are all of these stories ineluctable catch 22s?
CHOICE 1:
After you have sex with everybody that you want to and deal with the difficulty of settling down with one.
CHOICE 2:
You DO do it the right way and get ready to be bored out of your mind at some point?
One possibility that was not explored in this book at any length is that of an open marriage. (That book was written by Jenny Block and is entitled "Open.")
But, in real life, the danger that I have seen with that is that the person ends up leaving their spouse for the one with whom they have more sexual attraction - - even if it is only transient.
The approach to marriage that I have seen that works best is the Orthodox Jewish / Muslim / Mormon type way.
In the first (which I am), People only have two weeks out of every month available for sexual activity and they do not interact with / touch any woman who is not their wife. (Some men go a little bit further, and they will not even make eye contact with a woman who is not their wife or look at another woman.)
This life also goes with no television and a generally very regimented existence.
But, as evidenced by the fact that the average Orthodox house has about 5.5 children, it does seem that regular sex is a thing.
Is that worth it to most people?
As was mentioned in the book, sex is only 3% of a marriage.
Verdict: I might recommend this book at no more than the price of $5. I doubt that I will be rereading it, because I doubt that I will be keeping it.
The more suitable style for this might have been something like the Hite report or the Kinsey report: More time spent on quoting interviews at length than therapeutic speculation.
Quote ("Beautiful Stranger"): "Show me a beautiful woman and I'll show you a man that's tired of *beeping* her. "
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Gulp
5/5 stars
"Tons of neat factoids"
*******
Of the book:
-201 sources
-Almost entirely to peer-reviewed journal articles
-No index, nor glossary
Mary Roach has written at least a couple of other books like this, all of them published on WW Norton--which publishes something like 400 books per year. (It's an extremely difficult label to be published on, and only people who actually have something to say can be.)
She's a very skilled writer, as evidenced by the fact that she could even think of so many topics related to digestion--let alone staple them together into an easily readable (If sometimes gross) book.
One big question: Why no pictures of the people that are pertinent to this book?
There are plenty of pictures of other things, just none of the subjects of the book.
I would recommend reading this with another book: "Consider the Fork."
This book is chock full of information and, one can only hope to retain but a small fraction thereof.
And so it is one of those that is not worth a reread, because if the purpose was to retain all the information it would take another 8-9 readings after the initial one.
Just enjoy having some amount of brain candy and enjoyable factoids, that maybe you will remember having "read somewhere" at some point.
Verdict: Recommended
*******
This book being such a thoroughly reviewed one, I will just give a listing of the acquired vocabulary words as well as the neatest factoids.
Factoids:
(43)The average person eats no more than 30 foods on a regular basis.
(46) Creatures that swallow their food whole have limited to non-existent sense of taste.
(47) Cats can't taste sweetness and are monoguesic
(49) When people have their taste receptors destroyed, those people can die of starvation because they can't recognize things with no taste as food.
(53) The average dog's nose is 1,000 times more sensitive than the average human's.
(119)Cooter stink is caused by fishy amines. (Further research: this is measured by Nugent score. Scale 1 to 10.>7= frank bacterial vaginosis. Average black woman score: 8. Source: "Predicting risk of bacterial vaginosis: the role of race, smoking and corticotropin-releasing hormone-related genes.")
(144) Optimal crunch is around 90 to 100 decibels. (Some people think that eating crunchy food is a stress release.)
(152) Birds' gizzards exert 1,000 lb of force.
(156) A healthy adult has a new stomach lining every 3 days. (Pepsin and gastric acid digest it and it is rebuilt in an equilibrium state.) When a person dies, that machinery shuts down and the stomach digests itself.
(245) When people want to test underwear, adhesive back underwear pads, and chair cushions (these are things that help restrain the smell of flatulence), They don't have some large number of gas he volunteers. They actually reverse engineer the flatulence odor.
(272) 90% of nutrient absorption takes place in the small intestines.
(273) When dogs turn around and eat their scat, they are getting missing nutrients by running the meal through a second time. Rodents and rabbits also do this because their product is a "soft vitamin pellet" of nutrients synthesized in the lower intestine--nutrients that they would not otherwise get. They will lose weight without access to their scat.
(292) Elvis Presley struggled with constipation his entire life and his mother Gladys often had to "manually disimpact" him.
(296) Hirschsprung's disease is likely what killed Elvis. 25% of deaths from pulmonary embolism - - at least at one hospital - - were defecation associated.
(296) Elvis is Cole and had expanded so dramatically that it crowded his diaphragm and began to compromise his breath and singing.
(322) If the bacterial balance in your colon is upset, a fecal transplant can be an excellent way to readjust it. (This procedure was FDA approved in 2022--about 9 years after this book was published-- and there are about 48,000 of them done per annum.)
(324) Probiotics don't help with adjusting the microbiome because their bacteria are aerobic, but bacteria in the human gut are anaerobic. 95% of probiotics had not been tested as of this writing.
Vocabulary:
sensory analyst
chyme
pylorus
ravelment
olfactometer
cooperage
internal nostrils (nares)
prickle
sensory descriptor
flavor lexicon
tootle
knackers
monoguesic
plucks
melts
punch
slunks
trichobezoar/Rapunzel syndrome
variety meats
witchetty grub
Bugong mouth abdomen
farrow(ed)
welks
peckish
mucilagininous
cicatrize
histatin
gorte pap (Dutch food)
peristaltic wave
ptergoid walk
fistulated (stomach for experiment)
sash and sill
Transient lower esophageal sphincter relaxation (=burp)
flavor fatigue
gastrocolic reflex
hooping (a certain type of prison smuggling)
defecography
scybalous
alvine
codswallop
brachioproctic eroticism
sacral nerves
Janus-faced function (pain and pleasure on different sides of the same head)
angiodysplasia
grumous
glabrous
periblepsis
maculate
pronghorn
ungulates
Mylar pantaloon
autointoxication
"Internal bath" (=enema)
miasmas
ileococcal valve
pessary
rectal feeding (Yes, people once believed it)
rectal alimentation
autocoprophagia
egesta
clyster
tipple
cnidarian
vitrine
Hirschsprung's disease
colonic inertia
paralytic colon
defecography stills
lithotomy position
Bristol stool chart
fecal bacteriotherapy
fecal transplant
Quotes
(74) "..... The progression with ethnic cuisines: from upscale restaurant to local eatery to dinner table to the supermarket freezer section. (It starts as an appetizer typically. That's low risk.)"
(198) Should circumstances prevent a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year.
(217) No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an a$$hole is really bragging him up.
(235) The older you get, the slacker the muscles of your colon become in the more easily the organ balloons. As Len gaily remarked, "We get flavier all over, inside and out."
(256) Bogus diagnoses beget bogus cures.
Gulp
5/5 stars
"Tons of neat factoids"
*******
Of the book:
-201 sources
-Almost entirely to peer-reviewed journal articles
-No index, nor glossary
Mary Roach has written at least a couple of other books like this, all of them published on WW Norton--which publishes something like 400 books per year. (It's an extremely difficult label to be published on, and only people who actually have something to say can be.)
She's a very skilled writer, as evidenced by the fact that she could even think of so many topics related to digestion--let alone staple them together into an easily readable (If sometimes gross) book.
One big question: Why no pictures of the people that are pertinent to this book?
There are plenty of pictures of other things, just none of the subjects of the book.
I would recommend reading this with another book: "Consider the Fork."
This book is chock full of information and, one can only hope to retain but a small fraction thereof.
And so it is one of those that is not worth a reread, because if the purpose was to retain all the information it would take another 8-9 readings after the initial one.
Just enjoy having some amount of brain candy and enjoyable factoids, that maybe you will remember having "read somewhere" at some point.
Verdict: Recommended
*******
This book being such a thoroughly reviewed one, I will just give a listing of the acquired vocabulary words as well as the neatest factoids.
Factoids:
(43)The average person eats no more than 30 foods on a regular basis.
(46) Creatures that swallow their food whole have limited to non-existent sense of taste.
(47) Cats can't taste sweetness and are monoguesic
(49) When people have their taste receptors destroyed, those people can die of starvation because they can't recognize things with no taste as food.
(53) The average dog's nose is 1,000 times more sensitive than the average human's.
(119)Cooter stink is caused by fishy amines. (Further research: this is measured by Nugent score. Scale 1 to 10.>7= frank bacterial vaginosis. Average black woman score: 8. Source: "Predicting risk of bacterial vaginosis: the role of race, smoking and corticotropin-releasing hormone-related genes.")
(144) Optimal crunch is around 90 to 100 decibels. (Some people think that eating crunchy food is a stress release.)
(152) Birds' gizzards exert 1,000 lb of force.
(156) A healthy adult has a new stomach lining every 3 days. (Pepsin and gastric acid digest it and it is rebuilt in an equilibrium state.) When a person dies, that machinery shuts down and the stomach digests itself.
(245) When people want to test underwear, adhesive back underwear pads, and chair cushions (these are things that help restrain the smell of flatulence), They don't have some large number of gas he volunteers. They actually reverse engineer the flatulence odor.
(272) 90% of nutrient absorption takes place in the small intestines.
(273) When dogs turn around and eat their scat, they are getting missing nutrients by running the meal through a second time. Rodents and rabbits also do this because their product is a "soft vitamin pellet" of nutrients synthesized in the lower intestine--nutrients that they would not otherwise get. They will lose weight without access to their scat.
(292) Elvis Presley struggled with constipation his entire life and his mother Gladys often had to "manually disimpact" him.
(296) Hirschsprung's disease is likely what killed Elvis. 25% of deaths from pulmonary embolism - - at least at one hospital - - were defecation associated.
(296) Elvis is Cole and had expanded so dramatically that it crowded his diaphragm and began to compromise his breath and singing.
(322) If the bacterial balance in your colon is upset, a fecal transplant can be an excellent way to readjust it. (This procedure was FDA approved in 2022--about 9 years after this book was published-- and there are about 48,000 of them done per annum.)
(324) Probiotics don't help with adjusting the microbiome because their bacteria are aerobic, but bacteria in the human gut are anaerobic. 95% of probiotics had not been tested as of this writing.
Vocabulary:
sensory analyst
chyme
pylorus
ravelment
olfactometer
cooperage
internal nostrils (nares)
prickle
sensory descriptor
flavor lexicon
tootle
knackers
monoguesic
plucks
melts
punch
slunks
trichobezoar/Rapunzel syndrome
variety meats
witchetty grub
Bugong mouth abdomen
farrow(ed)
welks
peckish
mucilagininous
cicatrize
histatin
gorte pap (Dutch food)
peristaltic wave
ptergoid walk
fistulated (stomach for experiment)
sash and sill
Transient lower esophageal sphincter relaxation (=burp)
flavor fatigue
gastrocolic reflex
hooping (a certain type of prison smuggling)
defecography
scybalous
alvine
codswallop
brachioproctic eroticism
sacral nerves
Janus-faced function (pain and pleasure on different sides of the same head)
angiodysplasia
grumous
glabrous
periblepsis
maculate
pronghorn
ungulates
Mylar pantaloon
autointoxication
"Internal bath" (=enema)
miasmas
ileococcal valve
pessary
rectal feeding (Yes, people once believed it)
rectal alimentation
autocoprophagia
egesta
clyster
tipple
cnidarian
vitrine
Hirschsprung's disease
colonic inertia
paralytic colon
defecography stills
lithotomy position
Bristol stool chart
fecal bacteriotherapy
fecal transplant
Quotes
(74) "..... The progression with ethnic cuisines: from upscale restaurant to local eatery to dinner table to the supermarket freezer section. (It starts as an appetizer typically. That's low risk.)"
(198) Should circumstances prevent a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year.
(217) No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an a$$hole is really bragging him up.
(235) The older you get, the slacker the muscles of your colon become in the more easily the organ balloons. As Len gaily remarked, "We get flavier all over, inside and out."
(256) Bogus diagnoses beget bogus cures.
Woke Eugenics by Edward Dutton
slow-paced
1.0
Book Review
Woke Eugenics
"Yet another evolutionary book with the perfume of Nostradamus about it."
2/5 stars
*******
Of the book:
-12 chapters over 242 pages of prose. Just about 20 per chapter.
-Extremely heavily sourced. (682 sources; 2.81 PER page). Overwhelming majority seem to be to journal articles.
-BUT: the impact factor of his cited journals is typically less than 2.0
-No index
*******
In a sense, this book's ultimate line of reasoning is very old: If you want Utopia to arrive, first you have to tear down everything that exists. (The Islamists want to tear down the entire world to hasten the caliphate; white supremacists supported the 9/11 attacks, because it was hastening the destruction of an irredeemably corrupt society; Theodore Kaczynski was hastening The Luddite Revolution.)
Dutton is of a piece with these types: He thinks that "woke" movements will tear down the existing system and discourage genetically unfit people from breeding (p.199)
I myself am a race realist who has no problem with Eugenics / eugenic-arguments, and I would like to believe that raising a conservative normative family of sons puts me among the "genetically fit."
Nonetheless, I still don't think that this author has "come correctly."
(And how "correctly" might he come, given that he has a PhD in Religious Studies, and no lab in which to conduct research for want of a professorship? Also, he is giving serious consideration to people like the Unabomber - - who never reproduced. Was he really genetically fit?)
And as anybody who has read books about evolution / Psychology/Evolutionary Psychology/Pop Psychology knows, it is 100% possible to staple together a bunch of papers with statistically significant (but not practically significant) effects to make a book--- about nothing.
I do agree with his line of reasoning that "wokeness" could have genetic effects. ("Wokeness" is the commonly used term for "identity synthesized" politics. Thanks to Yascha Mounk for the concept)
Over what time scale, though? Wokeness has been mainstream for about 10 years. If the author is extrapolating this over long periods of time, don't we have a "restriction of range" problem here?
I come away with a sense of perplexity.
1. Some of the people that he cited are very discredited, including one that he cited heavily-- JP Rushton. (One of Rushton's books said that there was an inverse relationship between intelligence and penis size, and he put the average length of black men somewhere between 6.25" and 8".) And also Kevin MacDonald, who talked about "group survival strategy" as a way to cloak over his anti-Semitism.
2. When discussing evolutionary concepts, it is very easy to make a connection between any two random things that may not have a basis in reality. (And that's how you will convince yourself that the average black guy has an 8 inch todger.)
But on the other hand, it is not so easy to discredit the author *just* because of that connection, because it happens all the time that fringe authors are considered fringe only because they will point out the elephant in the room.
For example: It seems like everyone in the government and the media ties themselves in knots refusing to accept the apparently lower cognitive ability / general performance of sub-Saharan African descended people--but this guy has no problem being honest about it.
4. The author's output is so prodigious, how much is the repetition and overlap of the total set of his writings? Is it even worth the time to read other of his books? (And you best believe that I'm not purchasing 25 books by one author at the price of $20 per book.)
5. Could it be that so many predictions are made in this book, the statistically some of them will come true? (It is certainly what you would expect from the law of large numbers.)
6. I happen to live around Orthodox / Ashkenazi Jews, and I have noticed that they have a very disproportionate number of *extremely* nice looking people with the fabled Ashkenazi verbal IQ / general intelligence.
And you would predict this with a Duttonesque line of reasoning.
But then, there are also a large number of exotic genetic diseases / mental problems (lots of anxiety / ADHD, etc), and this doesn't quite fit with his theory.
What's the dealio with that?
*******
Second order thoughts / questions:
1. Over what time scale is the author talking about? Decades or centuries? If it's the latter, I don't think anybody who's reading this book will be alive to see the experiment played out.
2. There is at least one book (Alon Ziv, "Breeding Between The Lines") that encourages/touts the benefits of miscegenation. So, based on Dutton's speculation: if low status European males types marry non-whites and higher status non-whites marry lower status whites.... does "hybrid vigor" (a concept that Dutton himself has used elsewhere) make it such that those offspring are better?
3. Is there a such thing as a "mental immune system" ? (Apparently there is a such thing as cognitive immunology.)
4. (p.168) Dutton talks about social class in England being understandable as "separate breeding castes." But what if you have a really nice looking girl from one of the lower castes marry/ have babies with a lower one, are the castes really that stable? And "status exchange theory" is not new. (90% of black Americans have European ancestry, to an average of 17%; Black Men with White Baby Elephants is a sociological cliche at this point).
5. Upwards of a thousand unanswered questions.
-If Wokeism is dysgenic, can a population of people recognize this and stop it? Or, could it be that the easy conditions of Western civilization create the space for dysgenic patterns/situations to occur?
-If Western civilization is created because of eugenic selection, and only Western societies are interested in "wokeness," does that mean that eugenics contains the seeds of its own destruction?
-Could it be that since life is so harsh in the backward African continent that those difficult circumstances are selecting for eugenic conditions? Or that since life is so easy in Western Europe and North America, that genetic selection is at a standstill? Or even actively dysgenic?
-What is the deal with these genetically fit white people that the author talks about financing and supporting the institutions that call for their own destruction? Is oikophobia eugenic because it is a (mental) product of white people or is it inherently dysgenic (But therefore could not be a Western / white people product?) because it can be the idea that leads to the destruction of the people that hold it?
6a. Maybe "group survival" is a strategy. If so, what are we to make of the fact that wokeness is anti-natalist? Dutton tries to square the circle with the "spiteful mutant hypothesis," but when I do further research ONLY his name is linked with it.
6b. Can group survival be different within a group? I live in a community of Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews. Ultra Orthodox Yiddish speaking Jews have 6.6 children per woman, but non-orthodox have 1.4 children per woman. It has been this way for a long time, and yet the population manages to stay stable. Or, could the solution for Japan be to just have 10% of Japanese women have 6.6 children?
7. Make up your mind. Hybrid vigor? Hybrid depression? Inbreeding vigor? Inbreeding depression?
8. Side note: I looked up some pictures of Andrea Dworkin, and I have to agree that she is repulsive.
Verdict: Not recommended. Too many papers in low impact journals, too many papers to sort through to determine the strength of their effects. Or even if they said what the author is asserting. (And that may have been the point, in fact.)
*******
Supplemental books that address some of the topics at length:
1. "Trans." Helen Joyce. Bits about the way reality is being stood on his head with a focus on Britain.
2. "The Coddling of the American Mind." Jonathan Haidt. Societies that are too comfortable auto-generate mental illness by defining down what is stressful.
3. "Bad Therapy." Helen Shrier. Self-generated mental health crises.
Quotes:
"Conservatives are having more children but mutational load is increasing, leading to more leftists." (71)
"One interpretation of black lives matter is that educated black females are angry that they cannot obtain high status males. Thus, whites must be portrayed as wicked in order to steer educated black males away from white women."
"But Wokeness goes further than merely creating Anarcho-tyranny. It brazenly politicizes the justice system in order to persecute its opponents. (140)
Anarcho-tyranny is defined "as a dictatorial state strongly regulating the life to the citizens, such as by enforcing woke dogmas, while failing to enforce more general law and order." (139, Sam Francis)
Woke Eugenics
"Yet another evolutionary book with the perfume of Nostradamus about it."
2/5 stars
*******
Of the book:
-12 chapters over 242 pages of prose. Just about 20 per chapter.
-Extremely heavily sourced. (682 sources; 2.81 PER page). Overwhelming majority seem to be to journal articles.
-BUT: the impact factor of his cited journals is typically less than 2.0
-No index
*******
In a sense, this book's ultimate line of reasoning is very old: If you want Utopia to arrive, first you have to tear down everything that exists. (The Islamists want to tear down the entire world to hasten the caliphate; white supremacists supported the 9/11 attacks, because it was hastening the destruction of an irredeemably corrupt society; Theodore Kaczynski was hastening The Luddite Revolution.)
Dutton is of a piece with these types: He thinks that "woke" movements will tear down the existing system and discourage genetically unfit people from breeding (p.199)
I myself am a race realist who has no problem with Eugenics / eugenic-arguments, and I would like to believe that raising a conservative normative family of sons puts me among the "genetically fit."
Nonetheless, I still don't think that this author has "come correctly."
(And how "correctly" might he come, given that he has a PhD in Religious Studies, and no lab in which to conduct research for want of a professorship? Also, he is giving serious consideration to people like the Unabomber - - who never reproduced. Was he really genetically fit?)
And as anybody who has read books about evolution / Psychology/Evolutionary Psychology/Pop Psychology knows, it is 100% possible to staple together a bunch of papers with statistically significant (but not practically significant) effects to make a book--- about nothing.
I do agree with his line of reasoning that "wokeness" could have genetic effects. ("Wokeness" is the commonly used term for "identity synthesized" politics. Thanks to Yascha Mounk for the concept)
Over what time scale, though? Wokeness has been mainstream for about 10 years. If the author is extrapolating this over long periods of time, don't we have a "restriction of range" problem here?
I come away with a sense of perplexity.
1. Some of the people that he cited are very discredited, including one that he cited heavily-- JP Rushton. (One of Rushton's books said that there was an inverse relationship between intelligence and penis size, and he put the average length of black men somewhere between 6.25" and 8".) And also Kevin MacDonald, who talked about "group survival strategy" as a way to cloak over his anti-Semitism.
2. When discussing evolutionary concepts, it is very easy to make a connection between any two random things that may not have a basis in reality. (And that's how you will convince yourself that the average black guy has an 8 inch todger.)
But on the other hand, it is not so easy to discredit the author *just* because of that connection, because it happens all the time that fringe authors are considered fringe only because they will point out the elephant in the room.
For example: It seems like everyone in the government and the media ties themselves in knots refusing to accept the apparently lower cognitive ability / general performance of sub-Saharan African descended people--but this guy has no problem being honest about it.
4. The author's output is so prodigious, how much is the repetition and overlap of the total set of his writings? Is it even worth the time to read other of his books? (And you best believe that I'm not purchasing 25 books by one author at the price of $20 per book.)
5. Could it be that so many predictions are made in this book, the statistically some of them will come true? (It is certainly what you would expect from the law of large numbers.)
6. I happen to live around Orthodox / Ashkenazi Jews, and I have noticed that they have a very disproportionate number of *extremely* nice looking people with the fabled Ashkenazi verbal IQ / general intelligence.
And you would predict this with a Duttonesque line of reasoning.
But then, there are also a large number of exotic genetic diseases / mental problems (lots of anxiety / ADHD, etc), and this doesn't quite fit with his theory.
What's the dealio with that?
*******
Second order thoughts / questions:
1. Over what time scale is the author talking about? Decades or centuries? If it's the latter, I don't think anybody who's reading this book will be alive to see the experiment played out.
2. There is at least one book (Alon Ziv, "Breeding Between The Lines") that encourages/touts the benefits of miscegenation. So, based on Dutton's speculation: if low status European males types marry non-whites and higher status non-whites marry lower status whites.... does "hybrid vigor" (a concept that Dutton himself has used elsewhere) make it such that those offspring are better?
3. Is there a such thing as a "mental immune system" ? (Apparently there is a such thing as cognitive immunology.)
4. (p.168) Dutton talks about social class in England being understandable as "separate breeding castes." But what if you have a really nice looking girl from one of the lower castes marry/ have babies with a lower one, are the castes really that stable? And "status exchange theory" is not new. (90% of black Americans have European ancestry, to an average of 17%; Black Men with White Baby Elephants is a sociological cliche at this point).
5. Upwards of a thousand unanswered questions.
-If Wokeism is dysgenic, can a population of people recognize this and stop it? Or, could it be that the easy conditions of Western civilization create the space for dysgenic patterns/situations to occur?
-If Western civilization is created because of eugenic selection, and only Western societies are interested in "wokeness," does that mean that eugenics contains the seeds of its own destruction?
-Could it be that since life is so harsh in the backward African continent that those difficult circumstances are selecting for eugenic conditions? Or that since life is so easy in Western Europe and North America, that genetic selection is at a standstill? Or even actively dysgenic?
-What is the deal with these genetically fit white people that the author talks about financing and supporting the institutions that call for their own destruction? Is oikophobia eugenic because it is a (mental) product of white people or is it inherently dysgenic (But therefore could not be a Western / white people product?) because it can be the idea that leads to the destruction of the people that hold it?
6a. Maybe "group survival" is a strategy. If so, what are we to make of the fact that wokeness is anti-natalist? Dutton tries to square the circle with the "spiteful mutant hypothesis," but when I do further research ONLY his name is linked with it.
6b. Can group survival be different within a group? I live in a community of Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews. Ultra Orthodox Yiddish speaking Jews have 6.6 children per woman, but non-orthodox have 1.4 children per woman. It has been this way for a long time, and yet the population manages to stay stable. Or, could the solution for Japan be to just have 10% of Japanese women have 6.6 children?
7. Make up your mind. Hybrid vigor? Hybrid depression? Inbreeding vigor? Inbreeding depression?
8. Side note: I looked up some pictures of Andrea Dworkin, and I have to agree that she is repulsive.
Verdict: Not recommended. Too many papers in low impact journals, too many papers to sort through to determine the strength of their effects. Or even if they said what the author is asserting. (And that may have been the point, in fact.)
*******
Supplemental books that address some of the topics at length:
1. "Trans." Helen Joyce. Bits about the way reality is being stood on his head with a focus on Britain.
2. "The Coddling of the American Mind." Jonathan Haidt. Societies that are too comfortable auto-generate mental illness by defining down what is stressful.
3. "Bad Therapy." Helen Shrier. Self-generated mental health crises.
Quotes:
"Conservatives are having more children but mutational load is increasing, leading to more leftists." (71)
"One interpretation of black lives matter is that educated black females are angry that they cannot obtain high status males. Thus, whites must be portrayed as wicked in order to steer educated black males away from white women."
"But Wokeness goes further than merely creating Anarcho-tyranny. It brazenly politicizes the justice system in order to persecute its opponents. (140)
Anarcho-tyranny is defined "as a dictatorial state strongly regulating the life to the citizens, such as by enforcing woke dogmas, while failing to enforce more general law and order." (139, Sam Francis)
Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream by Steve Viscelli, Steve Viscelli
dark
informative
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
The Big Rig
"The confidence trick of owner operating; required reading for neophyte truckers/would be owner operators."
*******
Of the book:
-209 pages of prose; 24 pages of data and methods
-209 pages/6 chapters + Into≈30pps/chapter
-206 point citations≈1/page. Respectably sourced
-includes glossary, index, bibliography
*******
A book like this should be as influential as "das Kapital," if for no other reason than the fact that the author actually did the work and lived the life of the subjects he was studying. (Karl Marx never set foot in a factory in the decades that it took him to write his magnum opus.)
Many, many thoughts:
1. One strange thing is that the author wrote a book 11 years after he actually did the research. (And the book was written in 2016)
2. This is a specific example of a general case in the United States, which is: after the Second World war there was a labor shortage and expectations for wages were set WAY TOO HIGH.
The subsequent decades required a lot of painful grinding down of expectations, for which a lot of people found *every other* explanation than the correct one ("exploitation"/"greedy employers," etc.)
3. Conditions have changed a lot since this book was written 8 years ago (again, 11 years after the researched events), and after the implementation of electronic logs across all trucks, wages have increased dramatically - - and that is because companies can no longer cheat. (Back when I was working first working as a trucker and getting my experience over the road, it was very common to divide the miles by the log speed in order to shave hours off of the book--as the author notes.)
No more.
4a. Over the road is not fun, but it's not the only type of trucking--and I do know that this author wants to portray all the worst parts of trucking because he has an agenda. There is also local, and regional. (I myself do nearly all of my work within about a 20 mi radius and my earnings are sufficient to get the mortgage, two cars, and private tuition for children paid.)
4b. Per mile is not the only way to be paid. You could be flat rate (this is the most common way for dedicated runs), hourly, or paid as a percentage of the load.
4c. This author mainly talks about brokered loads (this is where loads are figured out one at a time), but there also exist contracted loads and "shuttling" (this is where you do the same load several times a day / week).
5. It seems that the author worked for Werner (and people who are inside the industry can put together the clues and see that he also appears to have been talking about Swift and Roehl). They are not fun to work for, and the training is also not fun; but you have to get your foot in the door somewhere before you can find a better job.
6a. Viscelli talks about the owner operator scam, and a moment's thought would tell *any* rational person that an employer doesn't have any incentive whatsoever to pay an owner operator more of the load for no reason at all. Owner operator has to come with some risk, and there are a lot of unintelligent truckers and.... "a sucker is born every minute."
6b. In reality, the rubber (of needing to sell product and turn a profit in an industry with cutthroat competition and very low margins) has to meet the road (knowing *who is* your mark/ market/ dupe and what your sales techniques have to be) for a LOT of industries.
Do we fault casinos for duping people out of money? (Even though the calculations are basic statistics.)
Do we fault car dealerships for trying to sell leases that a reasonable person would calculate not to be cost effective?
Do we fault Onlyfans for not telling everybody that the average performer makes $1,300 per annum?
Trucking is not a special case, looked at in this way.
6c. When a driver is sitting and staring at the road for 10 hours per night, he MUST consider that the costs of operating a truck (accounting, repairs, brokerage, etc) are cheaper spread over a larger number of units than only 1 or 2. If this thought has never occurred to him, then his head is as empty as a flower pot and he's going to have to learn the hard way.
C'est la vie.
7a. In a gold rush, the people that get richest are the ones selling shovels and beer and not necessarily the ones digging for gold. So, it's not hard to believe that some businesses would cash in on selling management services to owner operators.
7b. Leasing companies (Driver Source/ Transforce/etc) are another tactic that employers can use to shield themselves from the responsibility of an employee / employer relationship (workman's comp, Social security, liability, etc). From the driver's perspective, it's good to know that they are there because they are another way to make a living locally.
8. What other way could it be? In an industry burdened with overcapacity, prices just have to fall to market clearing levels. Nothing new needs to be adduced here.
*******
In spite of the fact that the author did actually do the work that he is talking about, there seem to be a number of familiar lines of reasoning:
1. Labor theory of value: Drivers are worth some inherent amount, instead of just what the market will bear (p. 9).
2. Arbitrary coherence: everything is the way that it is just because, and legislation can make it just be another way. (So, this author brings: unionization, re-regulation. It's odd that he does, given that a significant part of the book is spent detailing carriers' workarounds for inconvenient legislation. Also, what does it look like trying to unionize an industry with such filthy overcapacity?)
3. (p.203) Class struggle. "The history of trucking can be understood as a struggle between drivers and carriers for control over working conditions and pay."
4. Just " discourse" 'all over the place--sometimes three or four times per page.
I'm really grudging about reading something by authors that use the word "discourse" a little bit too frequently (almost wish I had bought this on Kindle to see how many times he does.)
Verdict: I would recommend a copy of this job to anybody that was going to trucking school or within the first several months of his career. (He could read this during dock time/ in the hotel at night after classes.)
Forewarned is forearmed.
Quotes:
(p.139) "Workers become small business owners. Employers become business partners. Income becomes profit. Lower incomes and unpaid time become investments."
The Big Rig
"The confidence trick of owner operating; required reading for neophyte truckers/would be owner operators."
*******
Of the book:
-209 pages of prose; 24 pages of data and methods
-209 pages/6 chapters + Into≈30pps/chapter
-206 point citations≈1/page. Respectably sourced
-includes glossary, index, bibliography
*******
A book like this should be as influential as "das Kapital," if for no other reason than the fact that the author actually did the work and lived the life of the subjects he was studying. (Karl Marx never set foot in a factory in the decades that it took him to write his magnum opus.)
Many, many thoughts:
1. One strange thing is that the author wrote a book 11 years after he actually did the research. (And the book was written in 2016)
2. This is a specific example of a general case in the United States, which is: after the Second World war there was a labor shortage and expectations for wages were set WAY TOO HIGH.
The subsequent decades required a lot of painful grinding down of expectations, for which a lot of people found *every other* explanation than the correct one ("exploitation"/"greedy employers," etc.)
3. Conditions have changed a lot since this book was written 8 years ago (again, 11 years after the researched events), and after the implementation of electronic logs across all trucks, wages have increased dramatically - - and that is because companies can no longer cheat. (Back when I was working first working as a trucker and getting my experience over the road, it was very common to divide the miles by the log speed in order to shave hours off of the book--as the author notes.)
No more.
4a. Over the road is not fun, but it's not the only type of trucking--and I do know that this author wants to portray all the worst parts of trucking because he has an agenda. There is also local, and regional. (I myself do nearly all of my work within about a 20 mi radius and my earnings are sufficient to get the mortgage, two cars, and private tuition for children paid.)
4b. Per mile is not the only way to be paid. You could be flat rate (this is the most common way for dedicated runs), hourly, or paid as a percentage of the load.
4c. This author mainly talks about brokered loads (this is where loads are figured out one at a time), but there also exist contracted loads and "shuttling" (this is where you do the same load several times a day / week).
5. It seems that the author worked for Werner (and people who are inside the industry can put together the clues and see that he also appears to have been talking about Swift and Roehl). They are not fun to work for, and the training is also not fun; but you have to get your foot in the door somewhere before you can find a better job.
6a. Viscelli talks about the owner operator scam, and a moment's thought would tell *any* rational person that an employer doesn't have any incentive whatsoever to pay an owner operator more of the load for no reason at all. Owner operator has to come with some risk, and there are a lot of unintelligent truckers and.... "a sucker is born every minute."
6b. In reality, the rubber (of needing to sell product and turn a profit in an industry with cutthroat competition and very low margins) has to meet the road (knowing *who is* your mark/ market/ dupe and what your sales techniques have to be) for a LOT of industries.
Do we fault casinos for duping people out of money? (Even though the calculations are basic statistics.)
Do we fault car dealerships for trying to sell leases that a reasonable person would calculate not to be cost effective?
Do we fault Onlyfans for not telling everybody that the average performer makes $1,300 per annum?
Trucking is not a special case, looked at in this way.
6c. When a driver is sitting and staring at the road for 10 hours per night, he MUST consider that the costs of operating a truck (accounting, repairs, brokerage, etc) are cheaper spread over a larger number of units than only 1 or 2. If this thought has never occurred to him, then his head is as empty as a flower pot and he's going to have to learn the hard way.
C'est la vie.
7a. In a gold rush, the people that get richest are the ones selling shovels and beer and not necessarily the ones digging for gold. So, it's not hard to believe that some businesses would cash in on selling management services to owner operators.
7b. Leasing companies (Driver Source/ Transforce/etc) are another tactic that employers can use to shield themselves from the responsibility of an employee / employer relationship (workman's comp, Social security, liability, etc). From the driver's perspective, it's good to know that they are there because they are another way to make a living locally.
8. What other way could it be? In an industry burdened with overcapacity, prices just have to fall to market clearing levels. Nothing new needs to be adduced here.
*******
In spite of the fact that the author did actually do the work that he is talking about, there seem to be a number of familiar lines of reasoning:
1. Labor theory of value: Drivers are worth some inherent amount, instead of just what the market will bear (p. 9).
2. Arbitrary coherence: everything is the way that it is just because, and legislation can make it just be another way. (So, this author brings: unionization, re-regulation. It's odd that he does, given that a significant part of the book is spent detailing carriers' workarounds for inconvenient legislation. Also, what does it look like trying to unionize an industry with such filthy overcapacity?)
3. (p.203) Class struggle. "The history of trucking can be understood as a struggle between drivers and carriers for control over working conditions and pay."
4. Just " discourse" 'all over the place--sometimes three or four times per page.
I'm really grudging about reading something by authors that use the word "discourse" a little bit too frequently (almost wish I had bought this on Kindle to see how many times he does.)
Verdict: I would recommend a copy of this job to anybody that was going to trucking school or within the first several months of his career. (He could read this during dock time/ in the hotel at night after classes.)
Forewarned is forearmed.
Quotes:
(p.139) "Workers become small business owners. Employers become business partners. Income becomes profit. Lower incomes and unpaid time become investments."
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess (Book 19) by Jeff Kinney
adventurous
funny
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
5/5 stars
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess
A parent's review: modest, kosher, funny
*******
All of these books have multiple themes, so the ones that I extract from this are:
1. Family members getting on each other's nerves. (Highly relatable.)
2. Sibling rivalry
3. Teenage relationships come and go and are not that serious. (Years later you won't even know where they are.)
4. Sanitized version of Captain save a Hoe
5. YouTube/internet celebrities.
6. Free range parenting versus helicopter parenting.
7. Senescence of grandparents. Possible Alzheimer's/ dementia.
The whole book doesn't even take an hour to read, so For such a small investment it's worth it to be aware of what your kids are reading / as a palate cleanser.
5/5 stars
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess
A parent's review: modest, kosher, funny
*******
All of these books have multiple themes, so the ones that I extract from this are:
1. Family members getting on each other's nerves. (Highly relatable.)
2. Sibling rivalry
3. Teenage relationships come and go and are not that serious. (Years later you won't even know where they are.)
4. Sanitized version of Captain save a Hoe
5. YouTube/internet celebrities.
6. Free range parenting versus helicopter parenting.
7. Senescence of grandparents. Possible Alzheimer's/ dementia.
The whole book doesn't even take an hour to read, so For such a small investment it's worth it to be aware of what your kids are reading / as a palate cleanser.
The Jewish Mind by Raphael Patai
Book Review (Part 1 of 2)
The Jewish Mind
Raphael Pattai
5/5 stars
"Great historical overview"
*******
Of the book:
-541 pages over 18 chapters and a conclusion. 28pps/per
- 1,115 point citations, 2.1/page (=well sourced)
-Many of the chapters are broken up into 125 subsections/small essays that are between 2 and 10 pages to make it such that one concept can be finished in one sitting.
-Overall book is in three parts (definitions, historical encounters, description of the Jewish psyche.)
*******
This is actually two books bound into one, and I think that the author put them together for convenience.
It has some elements of "The Arab Mind," along with a lot more Jewish history. (It makes sense, because the Jewish history is much longer and also a lot more literary.)
Six major external influences on the Jewish mind:
1. Contact with Canaanites;
2. Hellenism;
3. Arab conquest;
4. Renaissance Italy;
5. Eastern European Jews and Christian sectarian movements;
6. Jewish enlightenment/Haskallah
*******
Actual historical details not withstanding, the basic formula is that:
Jews / Israelites (because they have been different things at different times) lived in place X. They came in to contact with and were influenced by ideas X1, X2, X3.
After they figured out how to Judaize the idea, the upshot is XJ1, XJ2, XJ3.
So, one example is:
1. Israelite culture has a nomadic desert substructure with the influence of settled Canaanite people.
2. Israelite sacrificial ritual was adopted from Canaanites, except to ONE Gd instead of multiple. Even though there are vestiges of the sacrificial system, it must be clear that Rabbinic Judaism did not spring fully formed from prehistory.
Another example is:
1. Hasidim lived in Russia, and it was a deeply Xtian place that was in the process of religious ferment because of schism between different groups. And so certain elements were borrowed from the church and various fringe groups, but re-adapted.
2. Polish Catholics rank their clergy, so of course Hasidim could rank their rebbes. Confession is a big thing with the Catholics, so of course Hasidim could go and confess and speech to their Tzaddiqim. (p.213).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. The events in the book were both too numerous and too shocking to do justice by even listing a small fraction, and even that much would expand the review to unreadable lengths.
The best that I can do is try to summarize the takeaway messages:
a. The insular nature of the shtetl was not the case for all of Judaism, and there were very long periods where there was contact with neighbors and therefore influence.
As much as I would like to believe in the complete impermeability of Judaism to any surrounding influences, that belief went from "difficult to sustain" before this book to " impossible" afterward.
b. The shtetl was not even enough to prevent any type of inflow from the surrounding cultures. Hasidism is extremely Christologically awkward in many respects. (Reincarnation. Confession. Spiritual leaders in an intercessionary capacity. Loopy mysticism.)
The Chabad Mesichists did not come out of the blue, and there is a direct line from Jews living around churches to..... that.
c. This two-way borrowing is several thousand years old. It is disgusting for Hanukkah to be repurposed as the "Jewish version of Xmas" (gift-giving, "Hanukkah bushes," etc.)---and it is for this exact reason that I don't give Hanukkah presents
Be that as it may, it has several thousand years of precedent.
2. I thought that this book would be read once and done, but apparently there's so much information that it should be reread maybe a year or two after the first reading to try to extract as much information as possible. (How easy is it to separate the concepts of ethno-history versus inner history?)
3. This book talks about certain topics that were included in the Paul Johnson tome "A History of the Jews," but it is substantially more readable.
4. The Hasidim of today are emphatically not the same thing as their forbearers. The collective unconscious is not a reliable source of the way that things actually were.
5. Hasidism are an example of how:
i. If you want your belief system to survive, it's better that you have plenty of babies and try to influence them than to try to influence people that have nothing to do with you.
ii. You can become mainstream if you merely stand your ground. (I wonder if Open Orthodoxy is the Hasidut of yesterday. If they stand their ground, they just might be.)
6. The Vilna Gaon:
a. Actually studied grammar and cantillation--in contrast to the proud and defiant ignorance of today's Haredim.
b. Wrote dozens of rabbinical books, and none were published in his lifetime. (p.256).
c. Did have an interest in Kabbalah, in spite of his incandescent hatred of Hasidim.
7. East European Talmudism (The focus on the study of Talmud to the exclusion of anything else) is something that came from one particular period, and was not always the norm.
8. Before I read this book, I thought that the rate of Jewish people who converted to Xtianity was on the order of one out of a million. But, this book makes me believe that it is a lot more common than that. (50,000 in Spain converted and 200,000 left. [p.150])
9. Jews have been selling their brain power for a very long time. In a lot of different empires.
10. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in Israel: This is the first time in a couple of thousand years that modernists and traditionalists have had to sort out the relationship between themselves, without an outside power imposing a solution. Amos Oz has suggested that when / if Israel tears itself apart, It will go back to the status quo of Gentiles stopping Jews from being at each other's throats. Pattai observed this half a century earlier about events from 1796.
Vocabulary:
autocephalous
synarchy
quiddity
eo ipso
epispasm
ephebion
petasos
musive (style of writing)
dionysian
ecumenism
antinomianism
nostrum
ethos/logos/pathos
quadriga
apotropaic
terzina
sestina
cazona
canzonetta
madrigal
horatory
neofiti
Paris Sanhedrin
adytum
salon
salonnardes
Quotes:
(p.44) Each of these processes can be considered an example of the Jewish intellectual facility to make a virtue out of necessity, to acquire a vernacular from the Gentile environment, and to 'Judaize' it intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally.
(p.266) With the Enlightenment, the Jewish unity came to an end. A wide gap opened up between those who continued in their old, traditional Jewish way of life, and the increasing number of those who acquired Enlightenment, and whose cultural orientation there upon turned away from religious Judaism toward secular Europe.
(p.263) In East Europe, where most of the Jews lived and where the culture of the gentile environment had little attraction, the traditional concept of Jewish peoplehood underwent an inverse modification to that it evinced in the West.
(p. 258) Therefore any change which impinged upon it [Judaism] must be opposed and combatted; all innovation had to be fought simply because it was innovation
(p. 254) The general tendency was toward more and more stringent restrictions; that is, the area of the forbidden was gradually enlarged - - this was always considered sound and safe Rabbinic practice - - while even the most outstanding rabbi would never presume to declare allowed something that had been forbidden of old.
(p. 253) The conflict between modernist and Orthodox Jews, which began about 1775, has not ended to this day.
(p. 248) These [German Jewish] salons were frequented by Prussian officers, diplomats, and courtiers, who often entered into dalliances and love affairs with the lovely daughters of Israel.
(p. 243) Mendelssohn and his coworkers for the Haskallah we're mainly responsible for launching the Jewish people on the perilous road to assimilation which led a sizable portion of German jewelry to conversion to Christianity - - among them four of Mendelssohn's own six children, and most of the rest into the Twilight zone of cultural assimilation from which for several generations many Jews continue to pass over into the majority religions.
(p. 182) The first student of Hasidism who commented on the non-Jewish influences it absorbed was SJ Hurwitz, a bitter opponent of the movement, whose purpose in writing a booklet about it was to attack and to heap ridicule on Hasidic leaders and followers alike.
(p. 150) ..... also led to a magicization and demonization of life. With the passage of time and the growth of religious ignorance among the Jewish masses in 17th to 18th century East Europe, this magic element became a dominant characteristic of traditional Jewish life.
******
(Part II)
******
This book was so lengthy that it took about 6 months to read, and fits and starts.
In spite of the fact, this is not going to be an easy book to get rid of because it seems like there is just so much linkage to the authors and data that characterize the ideational rhizomes that make Judaism what it is today.
I've already reviewed the first half of the book (linked).
While there were some interesting thoughts/data in the second half, it was a bit of a comedown compared to the history of the first half.
1. The data that he uses to quantify Jewish people were written down a half century ago, and much of the data was even a quarter century before that. A lot of the psychological / psychiatric concepts of that day are recognized to no longer exist. (How many versions of the DSM have we been through since then?)
In reality, sequencing genomes has become cheap enough that these questions are beginning to be studied more rigorously--therefore obviating all such pseudoscientific psychological speculation / claptrap.
2. The rate of intermarriage for Jewish people has been about 70% for many decades at this point, but Jewish people have not disappeared - - all of the anguished hand-wringing notwithstanding.
3. A lot of these points are rendered moot by future developments. So, for example, he talks about inter- ethnic distinctions within the context of Israeli marriage. But, several decades after this book has been written marriages between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are so common as to be unremarkable. (That is with the notable exception of the Neanderthal Haredim; They are what they are.)
4. Some things that he talks about may have had some statistical mass, but they don't square with this author's experience of reality. So, he talked about Jewish alcoholism (p.443), overeating (p.447) and drug abuse (p.453). I have lived in a good sized Orthodox Jewish community for about 11 years as of the time of this review, and I have met ONE alcoholic the entire time, ONE former drug addict, and probably no more than 20% of (genetically) Jewish (American) persons are overweight--compared to about 73.6% of non-Jewish Americans.
*******
A lot of this is preaching to the choir:
1. It has been known for a long time that Ashkenazi Jews have an IQ that is, on average, higher than all other ethnic groups.
2. It has been known that certain mental illnesses are a lot more common among Jews than others. (The author notes rates of Insanity of Jews that are 4.6 times higher than their neighbors. [p. 414].) The concept of the "neurotic Jew" still exists, even though being neurotic (in the Freudian sense) is something that people stopped believing in long ago.
*******
The chapter on Jewish antisemitism was quite enlightening. The hackneyed Freudian expression "internalize the hatred of the oppressor" is one that I'm reluctant to believe *specifically* because Freud said it was true.
But, this author actually attributes Jewish antisemitism to the Enlightenment, and with the imbibing of Western philosophy/modes of thought, Jews begin to see themselves through the (anti-Semitic) eyes of their much more numerous Gentile neighbors.
And *that* is the origin of Jewish antisemitism that has never been resolved.
What is sauce for the goose can be sauce for the gander: When Israel was reunified, a lot of Sephardim/Mizrahim began to internalize self-rejection because they saw themselves through Ashkenazi eyes (p.478), which saw them as having "aggressivity, undesirable personal trades, lack of culture, dirtiness, and bothersome children.
Verdict: Recommended
Quotes:
(p. 461) The negative features in this self stereotype can be so strong that they assume the character of self-hatred.... In low status minority groups, the desire arises for the respect and rewards enjoyed by the higher status majority.
(ibid) One of the greatest effects of the enlightenment was.... Intensifying the negative features in the Jewish self-stereotype.
(p. 479) My own experience with Oriental Jewish adults and youths in Israel was that frequently they were ashamed of their origin and tried to appear as if they were of Ashkenazi extraction. For example, if one asking North Africans you his place of origin, one would typically get the answer "Paris" or "France." Several further questions would be needed until one elicited the admission that he was, in fact, from Algeria or Morocco.
(p. 480) The curious phenomenon of Jewish supporters of black anti-Semitism could be understood as their acceptance, or rather demand, of a 'share of guilt for the enslavement of the African in America. A way in which they tacitly assert their membership of the dominant even if guilty majority.'
(p. 499) Every rabbinic scholar exercised authority to the extent to which his decisions were accepted by others.
(p. 501) But without the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children (Bereshit Rabba
9:7)
challenging
informative
slow-paced
5.0
Book Review (Part 1 of 2)
The Jewish Mind
Raphael Pattai
5/5 stars
"Great historical overview"
*******
Of the book:
-541 pages over 18 chapters and a conclusion. 28pps/per
- 1,115 point citations, 2.1/page (=well sourced)
-Many of the chapters are broken up into 125 subsections/small essays that are between 2 and 10 pages to make it such that one concept can be finished in one sitting.
-Overall book is in three parts (definitions, historical encounters, description of the Jewish psyche.)
*******
This is actually two books bound into one, and I think that the author put them together for convenience.
It has some elements of "The Arab Mind," along with a lot more Jewish history. (It makes sense, because the Jewish history is much longer and also a lot more literary.)
Six major external influences on the Jewish mind:
1. Contact with Canaanites;
2. Hellenism;
3. Arab conquest;
4. Renaissance Italy;
5. Eastern European Jews and Christian sectarian movements;
6. Jewish enlightenment/Haskallah
*******
Actual historical details not withstanding, the basic formula is that:
Jews / Israelites (because they have been different things at different times) lived in place X. They came in to contact with and were influenced by ideas X1, X2, X3.
After they figured out how to Judaize the idea, the upshot is XJ1, XJ2, XJ3.
So, one example is:
1. Israelite culture has a nomadic desert substructure with the influence of settled Canaanite people.
2. Israelite sacrificial ritual was adopted from Canaanites, except to ONE Gd instead of multiple. Even though there are vestiges of the sacrificial system, it must be clear that Rabbinic Judaism did not spring fully formed from prehistory.
Another example is:
1. Hasidim lived in Russia, and it was a deeply Xtian place that was in the process of religious ferment because of schism between different groups. And so certain elements were borrowed from the church and various fringe groups, but re-adapted.
2. Polish Catholics rank their clergy, so of course Hasidim could rank their rebbes. Confession is a big thing with the Catholics, so of course Hasidim could go and confess and speech to their Tzaddiqim. (p.213).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. The events in the book were both too numerous and too shocking to do justice by even listing a small fraction, and even that much would expand the review to unreadable lengths.
The best that I can do is try to summarize the takeaway messages:
a. The insular nature of the shtetl was not the case for all of Judaism, and there were very long periods where there was contact with neighbors and therefore influence.
As much as I would like to believe in the complete impermeability of Judaism to any surrounding influences, that belief went from "difficult to sustain" before this book to " impossible" afterward.
b. The shtetl was not even enough to prevent any type of inflow from the surrounding cultures. Hasidism is extremely Christologically awkward in many respects. (Reincarnation. Confession. Spiritual leaders in an intercessionary capacity. Loopy mysticism.)
The Chabad Mesichists did not come out of the blue, and there is a direct line from Jews living around churches to..... that.
c. This two-way borrowing is several thousand years old. It is disgusting for Hanukkah to be repurposed as the "Jewish version of Xmas" (gift-giving, "Hanukkah bushes," etc.)---and it is for this exact reason that I don't give Hanukkah presents
Be that as it may, it has several thousand years of precedent.
2. I thought that this book would be read once and done, but apparently there's so much information that it should be reread maybe a year or two after the first reading to try to extract as much information as possible. (How easy is it to separate the concepts of ethno-history versus inner history?)
3. This book talks about certain topics that were included in the Paul Johnson tome "A History of the Jews," but it is substantially more readable.
4. The Hasidim of today are emphatically not the same thing as their forbearers. The collective unconscious is not a reliable source of the way that things actually were.
5. Hasidism are an example of how:
i. If you want your belief system to survive, it's better that you have plenty of babies and try to influence them than to try to influence people that have nothing to do with you.
ii. You can become mainstream if you merely stand your ground. (I wonder if Open Orthodoxy is the Hasidut of yesterday. If they stand their ground, they just might be.)
6. The Vilna Gaon:
a. Actually studied grammar and cantillation--in contrast to the proud and defiant ignorance of today's Haredim.
b. Wrote dozens of rabbinical books, and none were published in his lifetime. (p.256).
c. Did have an interest in Kabbalah, in spite of his incandescent hatred of Hasidim.
7. East European Talmudism (The focus on the study of Talmud to the exclusion of anything else) is something that came from one particular period, and was not always the norm.
8. Before I read this book, I thought that the rate of Jewish people who converted to Xtianity was on the order of one out of a million. But, this book makes me believe that it is a lot more common than that. (50,000 in Spain converted and 200,000 left. [p.150])
9. Jews have been selling their brain power for a very long time. In a lot of different empires.
10. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in Israel: This is the first time in a couple of thousand years that modernists and traditionalists have had to sort out the relationship between themselves, without an outside power imposing a solution. Amos Oz has suggested that when / if Israel tears itself apart, It will go back to the status quo of Gentiles stopping Jews from being at each other's throats. Pattai observed this half a century earlier about events from 1796.
Vocabulary:
autocephalous
synarchy
quiddity
eo ipso
epispasm
ephebion
petasos
musive (style of writing)
dionysian
ecumenism
antinomianism
nostrum
ethos/logos/pathos
quadriga
apotropaic
terzina
sestina
cazona
canzonetta
madrigal
horatory
neofiti
Paris Sanhedrin
adytum
salon
salonnardes
Quotes:
(p.44) Each of these processes can be considered an example of the Jewish intellectual facility to make a virtue out of necessity, to acquire a vernacular from the Gentile environment, and to 'Judaize' it intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally.
(p.266) With the Enlightenment, the Jewish unity came to an end. A wide gap opened up between those who continued in their old, traditional Jewish way of life, and the increasing number of those who acquired Enlightenment, and whose cultural orientation there upon turned away from religious Judaism toward secular Europe.
(p.263) In East Europe, where most of the Jews lived and where the culture of the gentile environment had little attraction, the traditional concept of Jewish peoplehood underwent an inverse modification to that it evinced in the West.
(p. 258) Therefore any change which impinged upon it [Judaism] must be opposed and combatted; all innovation had to be fought simply because it was innovation
(p. 254) The general tendency was toward more and more stringent restrictions; that is, the area of the forbidden was gradually enlarged - - this was always considered sound and safe Rabbinic practice - - while even the most outstanding rabbi would never presume to declare allowed something that had been forbidden of old.
(p. 253) The conflict between modernist and Orthodox Jews, which began about 1775, has not ended to this day.
(p. 248) These [German Jewish] salons were frequented by Prussian officers, diplomats, and courtiers, who often entered into dalliances and love affairs with the lovely daughters of Israel.
(p. 243) Mendelssohn and his coworkers for the Haskallah we're mainly responsible for launching the Jewish people on the perilous road to assimilation which led a sizable portion of German jewelry to conversion to Christianity - - among them four of Mendelssohn's own six children, and most of the rest into the Twilight zone of cultural assimilation from which for several generations many Jews continue to pass over into the majority religions.
(p. 182) The first student of Hasidism who commented on the non-Jewish influences it absorbed was SJ Hurwitz, a bitter opponent of the movement, whose purpose in writing a booklet about it was to attack and to heap ridicule on Hasidic leaders and followers alike.
(p. 150) ..... also led to a magicization and demonization of life. With the passage of time and the growth of religious ignorance among the Jewish masses in 17th to 18th century East Europe, this magic element became a dominant characteristic of traditional Jewish life.
******
(Part II)
******
This book was so lengthy that it took about 6 months to read, and fits and starts.
In spite of the fact, this is not going to be an easy book to get rid of because it seems like there is just so much linkage to the authors and data that characterize the ideational rhizomes that make Judaism what it is today.
I've already reviewed the first half of the book (linked).
While there were some interesting thoughts/data in the second half, it was a bit of a comedown compared to the history of the first half.
1. The data that he uses to quantify Jewish people were written down a half century ago, and much of the data was even a quarter century before that. A lot of the psychological / psychiatric concepts of that day are recognized to no longer exist. (How many versions of the DSM have we been through since then?)
In reality, sequencing genomes has become cheap enough that these questions are beginning to be studied more rigorously--therefore obviating all such pseudoscientific psychological speculation / claptrap.
2. The rate of intermarriage for Jewish people has been about 70% for many decades at this point, but Jewish people have not disappeared - - all of the anguished hand-wringing notwithstanding.
3. A lot of these points are rendered moot by future developments. So, for example, he talks about inter- ethnic distinctions within the context of Israeli marriage. But, several decades after this book has been written marriages between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are so common as to be unremarkable. (That is with the notable exception of the Neanderthal Haredim; They are what they are.)
4. Some things that he talks about may have had some statistical mass, but they don't square with this author's experience of reality. So, he talked about Jewish alcoholism (p.443), overeating (p.447) and drug abuse (p.453). I have lived in a good sized Orthodox Jewish community for about 11 years as of the time of this review, and I have met ONE alcoholic the entire time, ONE former drug addict, and probably no more than 20% of (genetically) Jewish (American) persons are overweight--compared to about 73.6% of non-Jewish Americans.
*******
A lot of this is preaching to the choir:
1. It has been known for a long time that Ashkenazi Jews have an IQ that is, on average, higher than all other ethnic groups.
2. It has been known that certain mental illnesses are a lot more common among Jews than others. (The author notes rates of Insanity of Jews that are 4.6 times higher than their neighbors. [p. 414].) The concept of the "neurotic Jew" still exists, even though being neurotic (in the Freudian sense) is something that people stopped believing in long ago.
*******
The chapter on Jewish antisemitism was quite enlightening. The hackneyed Freudian expression "internalize the hatred of the oppressor" is one that I'm reluctant to believe *specifically* because Freud said it was true.
But, this author actually attributes Jewish antisemitism to the Enlightenment, and with the imbibing of Western philosophy/modes of thought, Jews begin to see themselves through the (anti-Semitic) eyes of their much more numerous Gentile neighbors.
And *that* is the origin of Jewish antisemitism that has never been resolved.
What is sauce for the goose can be sauce for the gander: When Israel was reunified, a lot of Sephardim/Mizrahim began to internalize self-rejection because they saw themselves through Ashkenazi eyes (p.478), which saw them as having "aggressivity, undesirable personal trades, lack of culture, dirtiness, and bothersome children.
Verdict: Recommended
Quotes:
(p. 461) The negative features in this self stereotype can be so strong that they assume the character of self-hatred.... In low status minority groups, the desire arises for the respect and rewards enjoyed by the higher status majority.
(ibid) One of the greatest effects of the enlightenment was.... Intensifying the negative features in the Jewish self-stereotype.
(p. 479) My own experience with Oriental Jewish adults and youths in Israel was that frequently they were ashamed of their origin and tried to appear as if they were of Ashkenazi extraction. For example, if one asking North Africans you his place of origin, one would typically get the answer "Paris" or "France." Several further questions would be needed until one elicited the admission that he was, in fact, from Algeria or Morocco.
(p. 480) The curious phenomenon of Jewish supporters of black anti-Semitism could be understood as their acceptance, or rather demand, of a 'share of guilt for the enslavement of the African in America. A way in which they tacitly assert their membership of the dominant even if guilty majority.'
(p. 499) Every rabbinic scholar exercised authority to the extent to which his decisions were accepted by others.
(p. 501) But without the Evil Desire, however, no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children (Bereshit Rabba
9:7)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
dark
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
0.5
Book Review
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1/5 stars
"Never judge a book by its number of Amazon reviews."
*******
This book is definitely overrated.
Remember that feeling when you went to high school/undergraduate and the instructor gave you a book that was so boring that you thought you weregoing to *perish* before you got to the end?
And then the the instructor told you that you needed to read this because it is "good" literature. (Stephen King or Lee Child are infinitely more readable, but they are not "good" literature.)
That's exactly the way I felt reading this book (it sold tons of copies, had 34,000+ Amazon reviews, and even had a movie made about it).
Only the inclination to finish what I started made me finish *this* book.
Problem 1: It seems like the suspense is dragged out wwwaaayyy too much; one oblique hint, forward 10 or 12 pages, and then another.
Problem 2: The characters slip into all of these emotional states for which we don't have any reason. And since it is just one fiction book among tens of millions of others, I don't want to invest that much time trying to speculate what is the subtext of what Ishiguro is trying to tell us.
For example: The character Tommy has all of these rages that are exposited frequently, and I'm still clueless as to WHY?
Problem 3: Can we get some time devices here? We keep hearing times such as "years later" and "years ago." Are we talking about 20 years? 50 years?
Problem 4: 1001 unanswered questions.
-How do they select who should be cloned for?
-Does anybody else in the entire country know about this?
-Why does the will to live not make these people want to run away?
-If they could be engineered to be sterile and technology was in such a level, why not just biologically engineer organs for needed recipients? (It's a hell of a lot cheaper than supporting an entire human being.)
-The organs that can be transplanted are: heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and intestines. But the thing is, you can't live without any one of these (Well, maybe, one kidney.) So, how are these clones living after two donations, let alone three and four? Not really do they live, but they also have full sex lives (p.238).
-Has the issue of rejection medication been solved?
-These characters must not have normal emotional states, because they couldn't if they would just allow themselves to have organs harvested with no resistance. So, what is the point of all of these pages of the characters (in the protagonist in particular) trying to sort out their emotional states, when we wouldn't expect that they would be like normal human beings anyway?
Problem 5: A couple of footnotes would have done for the American readers. (Let's remember that there are at least five times more speakers of American English than British.)
rounders? (≈baseball)
drafts? (=checkers)
bluebottle? (=Blow fly)
The penny dropped? (=it clicked)
stage whisper? (=under one's breath)
Wellingtons? (=rain boots)
hoarding? (=billboard)
******
Proof positive that the book is no good is the fact that they couldn't even make a profitable movie out of it. (Let's remember that "Dune" was a decent book and even when pieces were chopped out of it and spliced into many different movies, they still made money.)
A $15 million dollar budget (enough to hire a bunch of nice looking young white people with English accents) and a $9.9 million box office take.
Even though the same dystopian novel is never written twice, they all have similar perfume about them.
-Nancy Farmer. "House of the Scorpion." (If you know that someone is being harvested for organs, do you react to them with disgust? Contempt? )
-Lois Lowry. "The Giver" (Distancing language from death. Lowry recalls it "being released." This book calls it "completion." Lowry's book as professional "nurturers" and this book has professional "carers." )
Verdict:
Not recommended. Save your time. It was actually more fun to read certain other reviews that blowtorched the book than the book itself.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1/5 stars
"Never judge a book by its number of Amazon reviews."
*******
This book is definitely overrated.
Remember that feeling when you went to high school/undergraduate and the instructor gave you a book that was so boring that you thought you weregoing to *perish* before you got to the end?
And then the the instructor told you that you needed to read this because it is "good" literature. (Stephen King or Lee Child are infinitely more readable, but they are not "good" literature.)
That's exactly the way I felt reading this book (it sold tons of copies, had 34,000+ Amazon reviews, and even had a movie made about it).
Only the inclination to finish what I started made me finish *this* book.
Problem 1: It seems like the suspense is dragged out wwwaaayyy too much; one oblique hint, forward 10 or 12 pages, and then another.
Problem 2: The characters slip into all of these emotional states for which we don't have any reason. And since it is just one fiction book among tens of millions of others, I don't want to invest that much time trying to speculate what is the subtext of what Ishiguro is trying to tell us.
For example: The character Tommy has all of these rages that are exposited frequently, and I'm still clueless as to WHY?
Problem 3: Can we get some time devices here? We keep hearing times such as "years later" and "years ago." Are we talking about 20 years? 50 years?
Problem 4: 1001 unanswered questions.
-How do they select who should be cloned for?
-Does anybody else in the entire country know about this?
-Why does the will to live not make these people want to run away?
-If they could be engineered to be sterile and technology was in such a level, why not just biologically engineer organs for needed recipients? (It's a hell of a lot cheaper than supporting an entire human being.)
-The organs that can be transplanted are: heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and intestines. But the thing is, you can't live without any one of these (Well, maybe, one kidney.) So, how are these clones living after two donations, let alone three and four? Not really do they live, but they also have full sex lives (p.238).
-Has the issue of rejection medication been solved?
-These characters must not have normal emotional states, because they couldn't if they would just allow themselves to have organs harvested with no resistance. So, what is the point of all of these pages of the characters (in the protagonist in particular) trying to sort out their emotional states, when we wouldn't expect that they would be like normal human beings anyway?
Problem 5: A couple of footnotes would have done for the American readers. (Let's remember that there are at least five times more speakers of American English than British.)
rounders? (≈baseball)
drafts? (=checkers)
bluebottle? (=Blow fly)
The penny dropped? (=it clicked)
stage whisper? (=under one's breath)
Wellingtons? (=rain boots)
hoarding? (=billboard)
******
Proof positive that the book is no good is the fact that they couldn't even make a profitable movie out of it. (Let's remember that "Dune" was a decent book and even when pieces were chopped out of it and spliced into many different movies, they still made money.)
A $15 million dollar budget (enough to hire a bunch of nice looking young white people with English accents) and a $9.9 million box office take.
Even though the same dystopian novel is never written twice, they all have similar perfume about them.
-Nancy Farmer. "House of the Scorpion." (If you know that someone is being harvested for organs, do you react to them with disgust? Contempt? )
-Lois Lowry. "The Giver" (Distancing language from death. Lowry recalls it "being released." This book calls it "completion." Lowry's book as professional "nurturers" and this book has professional "carers." )
Verdict:
Not recommended. Save your time. It was actually more fun to read certain other reviews that blowtorched the book than the book itself.
Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Heaven on Earth (The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism)
Joshua Muravchik
5/5 stars
"393 pages of Communism's fatal design flaws and failed efforts to create a New Man."
*******
-393 pages/13 chapters≈30/chapter
-1008 point citations/393 pages=2.56/page.
VERY well sourced.
-≈12 hours of reading time.
Verdict: Recommended.
The author is clear that each of these 13 chapters is chosen to characterize an archetypical person in the socialist dream.
A lot of times people may speak for or against Socialism, but they don't have that much concrete material to say one way or another.
Reading a book like this will help solve that problem--or at least as much as you can remember from this book's massive bulk.
Big takeaway lesson from this book (Eric Hoffer quote): "The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless."
If somebody comes along trying to lead you in revolution, it is more likely than not that you are their self-actualization project/emotional therapy.
*******
1. Robert Babeuf. The first socialist was a product of the French Revolution; as in many cases, these socialist revolutions start out as the plaything of intellectuals - - as opposed to people that work everyday in a factory.
2. Robert Owen. The kibbutz / commune idea is not new: here is a case of it being proven to not work a full two centuries ago. (40 years before the American Civil War.) Neither is the belief in tabula rasa that would make it all possible.
3. Karl Marx ("Scientific Socialism"). Marx was a trifling bum. He never held a job a *single* day in his life. From 1851 to 1860, Engels transferred £55/annum to him--twice the yearly income of a British worker. During his lifetime, his own work was ignored and The fact that there's any memory of him is because of Engels popularization of his work.
4. Eduard Bernstein (and Vladimir Lenin). He lived long enough to see the ideas of Marx and Engels falsified by history, and at this point the question is whether or not they are treated like any other writer or as scripture. Bernstein believed the former, and Lenin believed the latter, which ultimately won out.
5. Vladimir Lenin ("Real Existing Socialism"). Details of his ascent to power and immediate pivot to brutality and suppression.
6. Mussolini+ some Hitler ("Fascism"). Fascism is his brainchild, But it is actually a product of the left and not the right (as is commonly thought these days). Mussolini started out as a socialist / anti-clericalist, and found nationalism later as a vehicle to power. Quiet as it is kept, Nazis were National Socialists.
7. Clement Atlee ("Social Democracy"). Fabian socialist. In the mold of Bentham, Mill and Owen rather than Marx and Engels. Strategy was piecemeal reform..
8. Julius Nyrere ("Ujaama"). "One party. One man, one vote, one time." He started out declaring self-reliance, but ended up being Africa's largest per capita recipient of foreign assistance. (Tanzania's GDP per capita is about $1,200 today.)
9. Samuel Gompers ("Union Card"). Gompers saw that radicals (socialists/communists/ etc) tended to co-opt labor movements for their own ends, and put as much distance between the American labor movement and the socialists as possible - - a situation that has persisted.
10. Deng Xiaoping/Mikhail Gorbachev-The first an example of successfully economic reforms, and the second an example of unsuccessful ones leading to collapse. Snippets of the brutal political conditions from the Mao years and beyond.
11. Tony Blair ("Party of Business"). Tony Blair is credited with having brought the Labor to party back to the right after successive electoral defeats. Labor à la Tony Blair≠ Labor à la Clement Atlee.
12. Israeli kibbutzim. Even the Jews couldn't make them work.
13. Afterlife. Jeremy Corbyn. Venezuela. Hugo Chavez. Xi Jinping.
Neat factoids:
1. The metric system is the only part that survived of the French attempt to decimalize everything, including months days and hours.
2. Socialism spread farther and faster than any religion. From the 1820 coinage of the word socialism until 1970, 60% of the Earth was living under socialist rule of one type or another. (Contrast this with Xtianity claiming the loyalty of 1/3 of Earth after about 20 centuries and Islam claiming about 1/4 after 13 centuries.)
3. As an example of how socialism is just another religion: When Robert Owen found out that his various collectivist projects were not going to work, he just recreated something very similar to a church. (They sang hymns and held Sunday services;They paid missionaries to missionize and called them "socialist bishops." They held seances.)
4. 58 third world states declared themselves "socialist." 7 in Asia, 13 in Latin America / Caribbean, 3 in non-African Middle East, and 35 in Africa (p.206).
5. Das Kapital had 4 volumes. The first written by Marx himself. The second and third written by Engels. And the fourth written by Eduard Bernstein.
6. Syndicalism is a variant of socialism.
7. (p.325) Tony Blair ran on a platform of "change" that was not sharply defined. In that way, B. Hussein Obama was an imitator.
8. (p.343) Amana appliances started out as a German Protestant communal sect in Iowa in the 1800s.
Second order thoughts:
1. These mass movements are also the brainchildren of wealthy people WAY more than spontaneous movements by workers.
It is amazing how many of these "revolutionaries" were either supported by their parents (Rosa Luxembourg. Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx. Leo Jogiches. Bernie Sanders.) or from wealthy families (Clement Atlee. Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Jeremy Corbyn.)
2. "And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page."
a. You have some indigenous people somewhere that have to get educated by Western/white people to become idiots. (Pol Pot. Julius Nyrere, et al).
b. You have some people somewhere co-opting of movement representing people that they themselves don't know. (Karl Marx. Robert Mugabe.)
c. You have some people in a hurry to take over a country from colonial authorities that they promptly run into the ground. (All of Africa.)
d. Socialism --> Totalitarianism as sure as night follows day. ("We just have to make this program work come even if it's at gunpoint.)
3. Socialism is not the panacea that a lot of black people think it is, most notably in its failure to do anything in Africa. Even the early labor movements (AFL-CIO) initially did not want any part of black people. (That was part of Asa Phillip Randolph's gripe.)
4. The two party system is not such because of any shadowy conspiracy. In Britain, as in the United States each party has to rediscover its message over time. Once you stop losing elections is when you know that you've gotten the message right. (It took six consecutive elections with less than 40% of the vote before Labor got it together.
5. Socialist expenses increase the further a country goes left. In the case of Russia, it was rectified without right collapse. In places like the United States/United Kingdom, people like Bill Clinton/Tony Blair presided over cutbacks of various types to social insurance.
6. With enough churn, Labor can become the "party of business" in Britain. Or how "socialism with Chinese characteristics" can be substituted for Communism. Or, how the Republican party can become the party of working people and multi-ethnic while the Democratic party becomes one for wealthy white people.
8. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment discrediting of Christianity left Europe hungering for a new faith (p.355) which they promptly used in a lot of destruction. Engelks and Marx recast it into a compelling religious faith.
Vocab:
opéra bouffe
calumnation
doughty
parastatals
trundle bed
Knights of Labor
phthisical
stinting
voluptuary
denizen
bearded
provenance
Third Way
fillip
apposite
Quotes:
(p.67). Karl Marx: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."
(p 79). Mark's asked him to ghostwrite the articles. Engels dutifully accepted the burden, coming from his day job at the firm, where he earned money to help support Marx, to spend his evenings doing Marx's job.
(p.88). Unlike the Torah, the New Testament or the holy Quran, all of which are studied asiduously by believers, capital fulfilled his purpose just by existing. Believers could assure themselves that it contained profound evidence that their worldview was more correct than any other.
(p.220). Western socialists looked upon the Africans like parents hoping to fulfill their dreams through their children.
(p. 165) A socialism liberated from the Democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism as a well-made glove fits a beautiful hand. (Charles Maurass)
(p. 166) They were reminders of Mussolini's point that fascism was a heresy of socialism - - very much the same relationship as Christianity to Judaism or other heretical schisms.
(p. 241, S. Gompers) "I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all the forces of organized society against a labor movement.... I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds have been woven the experiences of earning their bread by daily labor. I saw the danger of entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that the experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life."
(p. 252) Around 70 [Gomper's] health began to fail, forcing him to reduce his cigar consumption to 25 a day.
(p. 269) Not only did American labor contribute more than its share to the downfall of Communism, it proved to be one of the great obstacles to the global advance of socialism in any form.
(p. 277) One group of local party leaders was paraded through a village street, each man led by a rusty wire that penetrated his testicles. At the village Square all were shot. "
(p.313) Socialist ranks were fortified by erstwhile Communist who hastened to realign themselves as social democrats.
(p.318) In the British system, there are no primaries; candidates are chosen in a series of meetings.
(p. 333) The mainstream Left may pour the cream that lightens the coffee of capitalism, but they are not offering any other beverage.
(p. 354) In Jewish believe the focus of messianism is not on eternal reward but on progress toward moral perfection.
(p. 355) Most anthropologists agree that religion is universal; they have yet to discover a civilization of logical positivists. (They're 5,300 members of the American humanist association and 16 million of the Southern Baptist Convention.)
(p. 359) Part of the power of Marxism was its ability to feed religious hunger while flattering the sins of being wiser than those who gave themselves over to earn unearthly faiths.... The socialist narrative turned history into a morality play without the morality.
(p. 387, Clemenceau) Any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and any who is still a socialist at 40 has no brain.
Heaven on Earth (The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism)
Joshua Muravchik
5/5 stars
"393 pages of Communism's fatal design flaws and failed efforts to create a New Man."
*******
-393 pages/13 chapters≈30/chapter
-1008 point citations/393 pages=2.56/page.
VERY well sourced.
-≈12 hours of reading time.
Verdict: Recommended.
The author is clear that each of these 13 chapters is chosen to characterize an archetypical person in the socialist dream.
A lot of times people may speak for or against Socialism, but they don't have that much concrete material to say one way or another.
Reading a book like this will help solve that problem--or at least as much as you can remember from this book's massive bulk.
Big takeaway lesson from this book (Eric Hoffer quote): "The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless."
If somebody comes along trying to lead you in revolution, it is more likely than not that you are their self-actualization project/emotional therapy.
*******
1. Robert Babeuf. The first socialist was a product of the French Revolution; as in many cases, these socialist revolutions start out as the plaything of intellectuals - - as opposed to people that work everyday in a factory.
2. Robert Owen. The kibbutz / commune idea is not new: here is a case of it being proven to not work a full two centuries ago. (40 years before the American Civil War.) Neither is the belief in tabula rasa that would make it all possible.
3. Karl Marx ("Scientific Socialism"). Marx was a trifling bum. He never held a job a *single* day in his life. From 1851 to 1860, Engels transferred £55/annum to him--twice the yearly income of a British worker. During his lifetime, his own work was ignored and The fact that there's any memory of him is because of Engels popularization of his work.
4. Eduard Bernstein (and Vladimir Lenin). He lived long enough to see the ideas of Marx and Engels falsified by history, and at this point the question is whether or not they are treated like any other writer or as scripture. Bernstein believed the former, and Lenin believed the latter, which ultimately won out.
5. Vladimir Lenin ("Real Existing Socialism"). Details of his ascent to power and immediate pivot to brutality and suppression.
6. Mussolini+ some Hitler ("Fascism"). Fascism is his brainchild, But it is actually a product of the left and not the right (as is commonly thought these days). Mussolini started out as a socialist / anti-clericalist, and found nationalism later as a vehicle to power. Quiet as it is kept, Nazis were National Socialists.
7. Clement Atlee ("Social Democracy"). Fabian socialist. In the mold of Bentham, Mill and Owen rather than Marx and Engels. Strategy was piecemeal reform..
8. Julius Nyrere ("Ujaama"). "One party. One man, one vote, one time." He started out declaring self-reliance, but ended up being Africa's largest per capita recipient of foreign assistance. (Tanzania's GDP per capita is about $1,200 today.)
9. Samuel Gompers ("Union Card"). Gompers saw that radicals (socialists/communists/ etc) tended to co-opt labor movements for their own ends, and put as much distance between the American labor movement and the socialists as possible - - a situation that has persisted.
10. Deng Xiaoping/Mikhail Gorbachev-The first an example of successfully economic reforms, and the second an example of unsuccessful ones leading to collapse. Snippets of the brutal political conditions from the Mao years and beyond.
11. Tony Blair ("Party of Business"). Tony Blair is credited with having brought the Labor to party back to the right after successive electoral defeats. Labor à la Tony Blair≠ Labor à la Clement Atlee.
12. Israeli kibbutzim. Even the Jews couldn't make them work.
13. Afterlife. Jeremy Corbyn. Venezuela. Hugo Chavez. Xi Jinping.
Neat factoids:
1. The metric system is the only part that survived of the French attempt to decimalize everything, including months days and hours.
2. Socialism spread farther and faster than any religion. From the 1820 coinage of the word socialism until 1970, 60% of the Earth was living under socialist rule of one type or another. (Contrast this with Xtianity claiming the loyalty of 1/3 of Earth after about 20 centuries and Islam claiming about 1/4 after 13 centuries.)
3. As an example of how socialism is just another religion: When Robert Owen found out that his various collectivist projects were not going to work, he just recreated something very similar to a church. (They sang hymns and held Sunday services;They paid missionaries to missionize and called them "socialist bishops." They held seances.)
4. 58 third world states declared themselves "socialist." 7 in Asia, 13 in Latin America / Caribbean, 3 in non-African Middle East, and 35 in Africa (p.206).
5. Das Kapital had 4 volumes. The first written by Marx himself. The second and third written by Engels. And the fourth written by Eduard Bernstein.
6. Syndicalism is a variant of socialism.
7. (p.325) Tony Blair ran on a platform of "change" that was not sharply defined. In that way, B. Hussein Obama was an imitator.
8. (p.343) Amana appliances started out as a German Protestant communal sect in Iowa in the 1800s.
Second order thoughts:
1. These mass movements are also the brainchildren of wealthy people WAY more than spontaneous movements by workers.
It is amazing how many of these "revolutionaries" were either supported by their parents (Rosa Luxembourg. Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx. Leo Jogiches. Bernie Sanders.) or from wealthy families (Clement Atlee. Beatrice and Sydney Webb. Jeremy Corbyn.)
2. "And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page."
a. You have some indigenous people somewhere that have to get educated by Western/white people to become idiots. (Pol Pot. Julius Nyrere, et al).
b. You have some people somewhere co-opting of movement representing people that they themselves don't know. (Karl Marx. Robert Mugabe.)
c. You have some people in a hurry to take over a country from colonial authorities that they promptly run into the ground. (All of Africa.)
d. Socialism --> Totalitarianism as sure as night follows day. ("We just have to make this program work come even if it's at gunpoint.)
3. Socialism is not the panacea that a lot of black people think it is, most notably in its failure to do anything in Africa. Even the early labor movements (AFL-CIO) initially did not want any part of black people. (That was part of Asa Phillip Randolph's gripe.)
4. The two party system is not such because of any shadowy conspiracy. In Britain, as in the United States each party has to rediscover its message over time. Once you stop losing elections is when you know that you've gotten the message right. (It took six consecutive elections with less than 40% of the vote before Labor got it together.
5. Socialist expenses increase the further a country goes left. In the case of Russia, it was rectified without right collapse. In places like the United States/United Kingdom, people like Bill Clinton/Tony Blair presided over cutbacks of various types to social insurance.
6. With enough churn, Labor can become the "party of business" in Britain. Or how "socialism with Chinese characteristics" can be substituted for Communism. Or, how the Republican party can become the party of working people and multi-ethnic while the Democratic party becomes one for wealthy white people.
8. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment discrediting of Christianity left Europe hungering for a new faith (p.355) which they promptly used in a lot of destruction. Engelks and Marx recast it into a compelling religious faith.
Vocab:
opéra bouffe
calumnation
doughty
parastatals
trundle bed
Knights of Labor
phthisical
stinting
voluptuary
denizen
bearded
provenance
Third Way
fillip
apposite
Quotes:
(p.67). Karl Marx: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."
(p 79). Mark's asked him to ghostwrite the articles. Engels dutifully accepted the burden, coming from his day job at the firm, where he earned money to help support Marx, to spend his evenings doing Marx's job.
(p.88). Unlike the Torah, the New Testament or the holy Quran, all of which are studied asiduously by believers, capital fulfilled his purpose just by existing. Believers could assure themselves that it contained profound evidence that their worldview was more correct than any other.
(p.220). Western socialists looked upon the Africans like parents hoping to fulfill their dreams through their children.
(p. 165) A socialism liberated from the Democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism as a well-made glove fits a beautiful hand. (Charles Maurass)
(p. 166) They were reminders of Mussolini's point that fascism was a heresy of socialism - - very much the same relationship as Christianity to Judaism or other heretical schisms.
(p. 241, S. Gompers) "I saw how professions of radicalism and sensationalism concentrated all the forces of organized society against a labor movement.... I saw that leadership in the labor movement could be safely entrusted only to those into whose hearts and minds have been woven the experiences of earning their bread by daily labor. I saw the danger of entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that the experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life."
(p. 252) Around 70 [Gomper's] health began to fail, forcing him to reduce his cigar consumption to 25 a day.
(p. 269) Not only did American labor contribute more than its share to the downfall of Communism, it proved to be one of the great obstacles to the global advance of socialism in any form.
(p. 277) One group of local party leaders was paraded through a village street, each man led by a rusty wire that penetrated his testicles. At the village Square all were shot. "
(p.313) Socialist ranks were fortified by erstwhile Communist who hastened to realign themselves as social democrats.
(p.318) In the British system, there are no primaries; candidates are chosen in a series of meetings.
(p. 333) The mainstream Left may pour the cream that lightens the coffee of capitalism, but they are not offering any other beverage.
(p. 354) In Jewish believe the focus of messianism is not on eternal reward but on progress toward moral perfection.
(p. 355) Most anthropologists agree that religion is universal; they have yet to discover a civilization of logical positivists. (They're 5,300 members of the American humanist association and 16 million of the Southern Baptist Convention.)
(p. 359) Part of the power of Marxism was its ability to feed religious hunger while flattering the sins of being wiser than those who gave themselves over to earn unearthly faiths.... The socialist narrative turned history into a morality play without the morality.
(p. 387, Clemenceau) Any man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, and any who is still a socialist at 40 has no brain.
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr
medium-paced
2.5
Book Review
The Secret Life of Groceries
3/5 stars
"Relative proportions of information and agitprop"
*******
I almost wanted to believe a lot of this book, but it is a little bit on the sensational side.
I think he is the Barbara Ehrenreich of the grocery industry. (By "Barbara Ehrenreich," I mean somebody who came in with his own pre-existing perspective and just used working people as props to support a book that had already been written in the author's mind--before a single interview--as an emotional self-actualization project.)
And I learned this when I read his chapter on truck drivers. (Over 38 pages, I counted 11 things that were factually false and another few things that were misrepresentative. Some of this might be expected when you research a book in 2015 and then actually write it 5 years later, when conditions are not the same.)
So, how many errors are in the other pages / chapters? (I know this because I'm a trucker.)
Misrepresentative:
1. He chose to show us a woman whose teeth had rotted out of her mouth and who chose to urinate in a bag in the back of the truck rather than go to a bathroom 25 ft away.
As if she is typical.
2. He showed us the way that a driver can gross $200,000 per year but have only $17,000 take home pay. But, lease purchase and owner operator are scams that
trucking companies run on people who CHOOSE NOT TO BE company drivers. (There's a sucker born every minute, so why not?)
The rate for over the road company truck drivers is about 65 cents per mile. A leisurely 46 weeks out (home 2-2.5 days per week and off 6 weeks per year) at 2,500 miles per week is a $75,000 salary. 50 weeks out (home 2 days per week) at 3000 miles per week is more like $97,000 per year.
Let me just go through some of the things that the author put on paper that were frankly false. (Only for this chapter.)
1. (79) "A trapper keeper serves as her logbook."
NO. Paper logs have been finished for several years. It's all electronic now.
2. (82) ".. pressure in your landing gear, or the temperature of your brake lines."
NO. There is no pressure in your landing gear. Hence no gauge for it
3. (82) "... The unwillingness to get out of the cab to stroll around."
NO. No truck driver needs to be encouraged to go out and get some fresh air.
4. (85) "... boasting the highest total number of deaths per year of any job."
NO. Logging workers have 101 deaths per 100,000. Truck drivers have 30.4 per 100,000.
5. (90) ".... quarter tank Lynne estimates she loses when we idle overnight."
NO. Trucks burn about 3/4 of a gallon of diesel per hour when they idle. 10 hours is 7.5 gallons. A quarter of a tank would be 67.5 gallons. At the rate of $4 per gallon, all trucking companies would put their drivers in hotels overnight to save on fuel. (They could put you in a $200 room and still end up way ahead.)
6. (95) ".... Trainer at one of the larger companies.... When describing his attempts to weed out substance abusers."
NO. All CDL holders have urinalysis drug testing as a condition of getting their license, and every time you hire a company you have to take the same test, and you can expect to be tested between 4 and 12 times per year. Failing any one of those tests is grounds for immediate loss of job.
7. (98) "..... After the 8th week, they shift to team driving"
NO. When you go out with a trainer, You can expect the training to last about 6 weeks and you get paid and progressive jumps every 2 weeks. Probably start at $500 and finish at $750 these days
8. (100) "Half the time there is a blowout, a fist fight, a brawl in the cab And they leave the freight in the middle of nowhere."
NO. All trucks and trailers are GPS tracked, even back then. Nothing can be left anywhere.
9. (103) "DAC report."
NO. 90% of companies don't use it, and the ones that do are training ones.
10. (103) "... hundreds of miles away from help or cell phone reception."
NO. Can you tell me a single place in the United States that is "hundreds of miles away" from cell phone reception?
11. (105) "Every woman I spoke with had a story of an abusive trainer, one who assaulted them, harassed them, threatened to rape them, or did one of those things to a friend."
NO. Women are NEVER sent out with male trainers, and have not been for at least the 20 years that I have had my license.
Second order thoughts:
1. The rubber has to meet the road at some point. Price of labor (or any other price) can exist at market clearing levels; if the price is too low you'll get a scarcity, and if it's too high you'll get it shortage.
It's nice that the author tries to turn this into a morality play of Big Evil Corporations/ Heartless Industries against Valiant Workers..... But all these things are more parsimoniously / non-normatively explained by basic Economic concepts.
If a customer sees milk at Walmart for $2.25 and $2.99 at Kroger, then all the information that he needs to know about ALL details is contained in those prices.
2. Questionable information quality notwithstanding, the book unintentionally shows the reader that from conception to successful execution of a product requires many steps with actual risk. And that the silent evidence of the people that do not succeed is overwhelming.
3. (224) "The trade-off is one we accept almost unconsciously. After all, as the cliché goes, out of sight, out of mind." This phrase seems to be a rehashing of Marx's "theory of worker alienation." But the question is: if you purchase 20 things per week and each of them has a thousand steps... How many do you need to understand? 1,000? 5,000? And once you do understand the steps, then what?
4. Even Paul Krugman knows this: Jobs at low wages are better than no jobs at all.
So, the chapter about the Burmese migrants could be reinterpreted to explain the incentives of the working men from a country that is war-torn and unstable finding that their best options were on Thai fishing boats.
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of about $5. Not worth keeping. Not worth rereading.
Vocabulary:
sophrosyne
vista
daps and pounds
pinner joint
chthonic
SKU (shop keeping units)
benthic
trawl
thanaka
peeling shed
aquaculture
Factoids:
(134) 20,000 new products hit the shelf each year. 89% of those fail within 18 months.
(138) The cost of national rollout for even a single frozen SKU [product] is about $1.5 million.
(?) Profit margins at grocery stores≈1.5%
(9) The average store has 32,000 SKUs. The biggest have 120,000. (70) A typical Aldi holds only 280.
Minor quibble
(p.55) "He studied fair trade regulations like it was midrash, digesting thousands of pages of law, case law, and legal commentary... "
NO. When people study case law (in a Jewish context, since that context was presumably the purpose of his throwing in the word "Midrash"), what they study is Mishna / Gemara.
The Secret Life of Groceries
3/5 stars
"Relative proportions of information and agitprop"
*******
I almost wanted to believe a lot of this book, but it is a little bit on the sensational side.
I think he is the Barbara Ehrenreich of the grocery industry. (By "Barbara Ehrenreich," I mean somebody who came in with his own pre-existing perspective and just used working people as props to support a book that had already been written in the author's mind--before a single interview--as an emotional self-actualization project.)
And I learned this when I read his chapter on truck drivers. (Over 38 pages, I counted 11 things that were factually false and another few things that were misrepresentative. Some of this might be expected when you research a book in 2015 and then actually write it 5 years later, when conditions are not the same.)
So, how many errors are in the other pages / chapters? (I know this because I'm a trucker.)
Misrepresentative:
1. He chose to show us a woman whose teeth had rotted out of her mouth and who chose to urinate in a bag in the back of the truck rather than go to a bathroom 25 ft away.
As if she is typical.
2. He showed us the way that a driver can gross $200,000 per year but have only $17,000 take home pay. But, lease purchase and owner operator are scams that
trucking companies run on people who CHOOSE NOT TO BE company drivers. (There's a sucker born every minute, so why not?)
The rate for over the road company truck drivers is about 65 cents per mile. A leisurely 46 weeks out (home 2-2.5 days per week and off 6 weeks per year) at 2,500 miles per week is a $75,000 salary. 50 weeks out (home 2 days per week) at 3000 miles per week is more like $97,000 per year.
Let me just go through some of the things that the author put on paper that were frankly false. (Only for this chapter.)
1. (79) "A trapper keeper serves as her logbook."
NO. Paper logs have been finished for several years. It's all electronic now.
2. (82) ".. pressure in your landing gear, or the temperature of your brake lines."
NO. There is no pressure in your landing gear. Hence no gauge for it
3. (82) "... The unwillingness to get out of the cab to stroll around."
NO. No truck driver needs to be encouraged to go out and get some fresh air.
4. (85) "... boasting the highest total number of deaths per year of any job."
NO. Logging workers have 101 deaths per 100,000. Truck drivers have 30.4 per 100,000.
5. (90) ".... quarter tank Lynne estimates she loses when we idle overnight."
NO. Trucks burn about 3/4 of a gallon of diesel per hour when they idle. 10 hours is 7.5 gallons. A quarter of a tank would be 67.5 gallons. At the rate of $4 per gallon, all trucking companies would put their drivers in hotels overnight to save on fuel. (They could put you in a $200 room and still end up way ahead.)
6. (95) ".... Trainer at one of the larger companies.... When describing his attempts to weed out substance abusers."
NO. All CDL holders have urinalysis drug testing as a condition of getting their license, and every time you hire a company you have to take the same test, and you can expect to be tested between 4 and 12 times per year. Failing any one of those tests is grounds for immediate loss of job.
7. (98) "..... After the 8th week, they shift to team driving"
NO. When you go out with a trainer, You can expect the training to last about 6 weeks and you get paid and progressive jumps every 2 weeks. Probably start at $500 and finish at $750 these days
8. (100) "Half the time there is a blowout, a fist fight, a brawl in the cab And they leave the freight in the middle of nowhere."
NO. All trucks and trailers are GPS tracked, even back then. Nothing can be left anywhere.
9. (103) "DAC report."
NO. 90% of companies don't use it, and the ones that do are training ones.
10. (103) "... hundreds of miles away from help or cell phone reception."
NO. Can you tell me a single place in the United States that is "hundreds of miles away" from cell phone reception?
11. (105) "Every woman I spoke with had a story of an abusive trainer, one who assaulted them, harassed them, threatened to rape them, or did one of those things to a friend."
NO. Women are NEVER sent out with male trainers, and have not been for at least the 20 years that I have had my license.
Second order thoughts:
1. The rubber has to meet the road at some point. Price of labor (or any other price) can exist at market clearing levels; if the price is too low you'll get a scarcity, and if it's too high you'll get it shortage.
It's nice that the author tries to turn this into a morality play of Big Evil Corporations/ Heartless Industries against Valiant Workers..... But all these things are more parsimoniously / non-normatively explained by basic Economic concepts.
If a customer sees milk at Walmart for $2.25 and $2.99 at Kroger, then all the information that he needs to know about ALL details is contained in those prices.
2. Questionable information quality notwithstanding, the book unintentionally shows the reader that from conception to successful execution of a product requires many steps with actual risk. And that the silent evidence of the people that do not succeed is overwhelming.
3. (224) "The trade-off is one we accept almost unconsciously. After all, as the cliché goes, out of sight, out of mind." This phrase seems to be a rehashing of Marx's "theory of worker alienation." But the question is: if you purchase 20 things per week and each of them has a thousand steps... How many do you need to understand? 1,000? 5,000? And once you do understand the steps, then what?
4. Even Paul Krugman knows this: Jobs at low wages are better than no jobs at all.
So, the chapter about the Burmese migrants could be reinterpreted to explain the incentives of the working men from a country that is war-torn and unstable finding that their best options were on Thai fishing boats.
Verdict:
Recommended at the price of about $5. Not worth keeping. Not worth rereading.
Vocabulary:
sophrosyne
vista
daps and pounds
pinner joint
chthonic
SKU (shop keeping units)
benthic
trawl
thanaka
peeling shed
aquaculture
Factoids:
(134) 20,000 new products hit the shelf each year. 89% of those fail within 18 months.
(138) The cost of national rollout for even a single frozen SKU [product] is about $1.5 million.
(?) Profit margins at grocery stores≈1.5%
(9) The average store has 32,000 SKUs. The biggest have 120,000. (70) A typical Aldi holds only 280.
Minor quibble
(p.55) "He studied fair trade regulations like it was midrash, digesting thousands of pages of law, case law, and legal commentary... "
NO. When people study case law (in a Jewish context, since that context was presumably the purpose of his throwing in the word "Midrash"), what they study is Mishna / Gemara.