Here's a better journo calling out Lewis' shameless SBF peepeeriding

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/10/sam-bankman-fried-going-infinite-book-michael-lewis/675609

Archived in case of paywall:

https://archive.is/v38jt

!r-slurs and !bookworms I'll tag both because this book is bad enough to get ridiculed by both.

Choice Lewis Apologia

>Sam dindu nuffin!! He was just a wittle boy who was just misunderstood. All the evil Wall St bros just didn't let him win.

>They didn't have any polycule you guys. They just lived in close quarters.

>If FTX's assets were properly assessed, we would all find the missing amounts. I don't think any of them would ever lie.

>SBFs parents are just big mama and papa taking care of their wittle boy

>SBF is a super savant bro. You just don't get it. He fidgets with board games and plays Vidya during press conferences, wears cargo shorts and flip flops and wears a wrinkly suit when he meets big DC people. He's so humble!!

>When asked whether he'll go to Vegas, he says 60%. OMG! Did you see the nuance? He just sees the world in an absolute quantifiable way!! Woah!!

>"I don't feel anything. Emotions are a hindrance." Woah Sam is so intelligent. (I wonder how emotionless he would be if I broke his arm)

>Effective Altruism totally works bro. You just don't get it. Consider a doctor in Zambia working against malaria. He can only spend 10 months there because he has family to feed. Let's say there are 50 doctors like him. So in total they can spend 500 hours to fight malaria in Zambia. However if I become an billionaire by defrauding investors I can hire doctors who can spend 501 hour there. Therefore it is ethical for me to become a billionaire. Lewis says, no cap, it sounds good in theory.

Fricking BIPOC.

And many more.

Worst book of 2023 by far.

Been meaning to read this one for a while, was wondering if I can read New Testament first, then read Old Testament as a prequel. Would it even make sense or would I need context from the first book?

do you use an e-reader?

!bookworms

!bookworms. To discuss chapters VII-X of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Next week we'll cover chapters XI-XV.

I haven't read anything last week , so I gotta catch up this week.

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms

!bookworms

!nonchuds

Resident edgelord communists - @Transgender_spez @sandkwinn Stalin appreciation post

Source- Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins

By Annie Jacobsen

whats their deal

i saw this thread yesterday and lol'd irl

Would all the famous philosophers and writers grow up to be the same as if they were born today (meaning born some 20-30 years ago)?

They would lurk on 4chan

This. As r-slurred as most channers are, this website still appeals to philosophical types because it lets you share your thoughts without much censorship or lame incentive structures.

after i posted an ebin react gif of norm mcdonald laughing, i got this response

Okay, now try to make an actual argument (and make sure it's not a strawman)

When Joyce Carol Oates was thirty-four, she started a journal. “Query,” she wrote on the first page. “Does the individual exist?” She felt that she knew little about herself—for instance, whether she was honest or a hypocrite. “I don't know the answer to the simplest of questions,” she wrote. “What is my personal nature?”

The journal, which she began in 1973, eventually swelled to more than four thousand typed, single-spaced pages. Throughout, she alludes to a secret. “It's there, it's always there,” she wrote in 1978. “I wish I could give a name to it, even in code.” She thought about the secret so often, she wrote, that the journal could be named “The Person Who Has Written This Journal Lives a Secret.” She couldn't “help but wonder (and here fiction won't help me, art won't help me) whether it is a secret embedded deep within everyone's life, but particularly within the life of the creative artist.” At times the secret felt as “awkward as a hammer stuck in my pocket, getting in my way . . . at other times small and contained and indeed unobtrusive as a tiny pebble.”

Oates, who has written sixty-three novels, forty-seven collections of short stories, and numerous plays, librettos, children's novels, and books of poetry, told me that she remembered little about the journal, which is stored in nine boxes in the archives of Syracuse University. “It's sort of like words written on water,” she said. Although thinking about the “tsunami of unrevised, written-swiftly-off-the-cuff material” filled her with dread, she allowed me to read the whole thing, which covers twenty-six years. She stopped keeping the journal when she began regularly using e-mail; she expected that she would print out her e-mails and they would serve as her new diary, but she never got into the habit. She also gave me permission to read thousands of pages of her letters, stored along with the journal. “I can't bear to even think of glancing back,” she wrote me, adding that it would be like glimpsing through “the slats of a venetian blind the life or lives I was living at the time, a much happier time, irrevocably lost now.”

The first time I met Oates, at a restaurant near Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978, she had just returned from a trip to Scandinavia. She is eighty-five and very slim and agile, with perfect posture. She shows almost no signs of physical frailty. On her trip, after spending the days touring and giving interviews, she worked on her next novel in her hotel room every night, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. When I asked if she was jet-lagged, she said, “Oh, no—I'm totally over that.”

She seemed uniquely incurious when I read her lines from her journal. “Well, I don't know what to say about the journal because it represents work that I didn't revise,” she told me.

I had decided to write about Oates after learning that she had documented so much of her life. I thought that the journal might mansplain why she had never tired of her own mind. Perhaps no other writer in the past century has been so focussed on the products of her own imagination. Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull, but Oates, who has long been concerned with the question of personality and says she doubts whether she actually has one, has never exhausted her curiosity. There are only so many ways to dramatize the problem of being a self, one might think, but Oates keeps coming back to it, as if there is something she still needs to figure out.

@JoyceCarolOates you're so famous!

To discuss the first 6 chapters of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I'm on chapter 5 right meow so I'll try that one and chapter 6 this afternoon and post my thoughts then.

!bookworms What do you think of the book so far?

A distant prequel to my post on why the goblins aren't racist. A lot of the criticisms made about Harry Potter post-transphobia are terrible because it's people:

• not reading the text at all (or reading it solely to hate)

• making extremely shallow if not provably false criticisms to frame JK as more of a bigot than she already is

• patting each other on the back.

And it's really fricking annoying, so here we are.

The argument is this:

• House-Elves were enslaved

• They apparently like being enslaved

• Hermoine, the character campaigning to free them, is demonized for trying to free them.

Ergo the series supports slavery and JK Rowling is a racist. Hi-five!

And everything past the first point falls apart once you read the books at fricking all:

House-Elves liking being enslaved isn't a fricking fact. It's a justification put forth by Fred and George Weasley...who already think treating house elves like shit is okay. Fred and George are not, in any sense, presented as being particularly smart, nor are they meant to be experts: this is very clearly a half-assed explanation from a bunch of teenagers. But people talk about this like it was JK Rowling handwaving their exploitation with a fact. Which is a blatant lie.

Dobby, the most notable House-elf and our introduction to them, loves being free. Kreacher, the next most notable house-elf, hates being enslaved. Every other House-Elf merely claims to be loyal to their masters, but why wouldn't they be: the extreme punishments they face would obviously brew stockholm syndrome, like what happens with real slaves! House-Elves do not like being enslaved.

The next point is even dumber and has to be deconstructed on three fronts:

The characters that mock S.P.E.W. are, to my count, (a) fourteen-year-olds who don't know any better and are pretty dumb on average, (b) sixteen-year-olds who definitely don't know any better (Fred and George, their ages are placeholders) and (c) slaves suffering from stockholm syndrome. The characters that support S.P.E.W. are Hermoine--a student consistently portrayed as being extremely bright and wise in comparison to every student, much less ron, fred and george—and Dumbledore—a character who was basically infallible before the later books. People who screech about how "the characters make fun of Hermoine for it!!" ignore who the people making fun of her actually fricking are. Hermoine is clearly supposed to be in the right, and if you had any doubts, fricking infinite wisdom Dumbledore supports it.

Just because a large amount of the cast holds a belief doesn't mean the text is telling you that its' okay?? In the 2nd harry potter book, most of the characters believe Harry's connected to the snake! In the fourth Harry Potter book, nearly all of the characters, including Ron, think Harry cheated to get into the Tournament! Yet, somehow, we agree that those characters weren't correct. Why? Because you can't just say "most of the characters have this opinion gg". You have to apply context. And actually read the books.

If the underage and uneducated chorus yelling at Hermoine and Dumbledore is supposed to be right, why does Ron change his mind at the end of the books? Why is Ron lightening up to House-Elves a triumphant moment if not because Hermoine was fricking correct? Why does Harry act nicer to Kreacher after his exposure to S.P.E.W.?

We know for a fact that JK Rowling isn't racist, nor did she remotely intend for House-Elves to be racist (but don't get me wrong, the books aren't pro-slavery either). For one, the house-elves are keyed of fairies that would come in to assist heroes: they're no analogous to African people. More substantially, if JK Rowling's pro-slavery, it's a bit odd that she claims that Hermoine goes on to greatly improve life for House-Elves. While enthusiastically talking about the characters' futures. Even if I somehow granted you that the books were racist (they are not, see the rest of this post), JK Rowling indisputably isn't.

so yeah, the whole "house-elves are racist!" stuff is unironically lies bruh. You can't use "they only watched the movies" as an excuse, because not a single point that people bring up ever occurs in the movies—but they still go out of their way to show that Dobby loves being free, haha. please read harry potter with your eyes open bros

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

I started Never Let Me Go this week as part of the bookclub, couldn't finish the Vikings book yet.

!bookworms, don't forget about the bookclub discussion Sunday!

I know asoiaf is not high lit but still, I've always been optimistic about it being almost done

House of Leaves tells the story of a man who discovers an infinite spooky space within his home, which is depicted in a found footage movie that doesn't exist, which is described in a faux-academic book with incredibly bizarre formatting, which was edited, and compiled by a mentally ill s*x-haver who tells dubiously-connected stories in multi-page footnotes as his mental condition deteriorates.

I think this book was a bit too pleased with itself, and I didn't really find it scary. I did fall off reading a couple times, so I might have got a better experience reading it in one go. But every time I turned the page and saw a giant wall of text from one of Johnny's rambling schizo stories it felt like a natural place to take a break. Maybe I got filtered, but I took much more interest in the Navidson film and the imaginatively typeset criticism around it than in the bloated "aaaarrrrgggghhh I'm going insaaaaaaaaaaaaaane" bits (although the letters from Johnny's mother were interesting).

Despite my underwhelmed reaction, this is the only novel I've ever seen to treat its book as a physical object and work of art, instead of a neutral way to store a novel (which could also be done in a PDF, epub, audio file, oral tradition, etc). So much of this novel's character is in typesetting, rotating pages, the tactile experience of flipping back and forth, largely blank or wildly busy pages, etc etc. This would make reading it on an electronic device a decidedly deficient experience, and making it a linear audiobook actively impossible. We often think about what books are good at vs. what films are good at, etc. but this is the rare non-graphic novel to ask what the book as a physical object is good at. Not only do I like reading, I like books, and this is a fun (if exaggerated) exploration of what they can do.

So I really struggle with reading physical copies of books even straight forward books I know I will really struggle with the format of house of leaves, so I'm wondering if there's any audiobooks out there, I know there's not one on audible so what others options are there?

Hi all, I've been searching the internets high and low for an audio recording of House of Leaves- I've wanted to read it forever but as a law student it's hard to find time for reading for enjoyment, but have plenty of time to listen to books on my commute to and from school.

Hecko, I discovered house of leaves a year or so ago so I went ahead a got the book. I read a couple of pages of it and couldn't really retain any information. I don't know if it's because I have adhd or something else, but it's like that with most everything I read. I went and told my mom to return the book after I read the same page over and over again without understanding what it meant. Recently, I saw night mind's video pop up in my feed again and decided to try to read the book again. This time, I read along with an audio book that I found on yt. The thing is, it stopped after the introduction. I went ahead and read the first 5 pages of the navidson record but didn't really understand what it was saying. Does anyone know if there's any audiobook of this online? I'd be willing to pay for it. Thank you.

!bookworms have you read this? What did you think?

WHO IS THIS? He is wonderful.

He never even heard of the character. It's so fricking over.