The Very Hungry Caterpillar is, on a the surface, merely a sweet story about a very hungry caterpillar and his journey of consumption and metamorphosis.

The author had an entirely different meaning in mind.

TVHC is a story about the author's struggle with their sexual and gender identity, preceded by years of substance abuse and high-risk sexual encounters.

The story begins with the caterpillar hatching from an egg. The Egg is both vaginal and penile, resulting from the combination of ovum and sperm. Within the author, they realized their own sense of vagina and peepee, causing a cognitive dissonance in their own identity.

TVHC's insatiable hunger for food can be seen as a metaphor for a deep longing to explore and understand one's own identity. It reflects the desire to consume knowledge about gender and self-discovery.

TVHC starts by eating through one red apple. This symbolizes the early stages of puberty, menstrual blood, and singular s*x (masturbation). The fact that future foods continue to grow in number and frequency shows the author's increasing libido, but also a shame cycle that is both calmed and exacerbated by continued high-risk exploration.

When TVHC eats through two pears, this symbolizes their first sexual encounter with two people. The green color of the pears symbolizes marijuana abuse, as well as the color of young, supple growth of a plant and the loss of the author's innocence. Since this is the second day of TVHC's life, it can be inferred that this sexual encounter occurred early in life, most likely in abuse as a minor, setting the stage for a life of sexual confusion and impulsiveness.

As the numbers of food increase, so too do the sexual partners. As visualized in the artwork, the penetration of TVHC through food symbolizes the penetration the author experienced as the sexually receiving partner, and the resulting holes in the food represent the continued diminishing of their psyche and worth.

After the numerical scaling of partners achieves maximum, TVHC binges in many different singular foods, much like the author's series of promiscuous encounters. The pace of the text is at a crescendo, the sexual encounters frequent and fleeting.

The Cocoon is not a transformative moment, but one of death and burial. Death of the Soul. Death of the Vagina. Death of the Peepee. Death of the Self.

The emergence of The Butterfly is the emergence of Denialism. Unable to face the damage to his body and soul from illicit drugs and STDs, the author adopted a new persona in order to dissociate from their true self. It is too late however, and so a short-lived life of denialism is all that is possible, until TVHC lays a new egg for the cycle of abuse to continue.

I finished the first 3 parts of Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Dostoevsky, there's still part 4 to go which are roughly around 330 pages on the edition I'm reading (out of 1,000 ), so I decided to take a break for it before taking it back again (to read "The Luzhin Defense" by Vladimir Nabokov, a short novel just over 200 pages long but that's the subject of another discussion).

This is the second Dostoevsky book I've read, the first being "Crime & Punishment", but Brothers K is the one widely known as his magnus opus. Some Dostoevskyan themes are repeated like prostitutes seeking redemption and murderous buttholes with a supposed heart of gold. This is a 19th century novel so foids suddenly suffer from "hysteria attacks" which are dealt with as an actual pathology/disorder

The story centers around 3 brothers, the children of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov (a ghastly paternal figure with no redeeming qualities besides being occasionally funny). They are; Dimitri Fyodorovich (the eldest, an army officer, a libertine, and a drunk brute who can't form coherent sentences)

Ivan Fyodorovich (r/atheism of the 1870s personified)

Alexei Fyodorovich (known by his nickname Alyosha, a saint of pure heart who wanted to become a monk before his personal hero told him to leave the monastery and see the world).

There's also the servant known as "Smerdiakov", who's heavily implied to be Fyodor's bastard with the town simpleton. His late mother who died at childbirth was mentally disabled and pretty much everyone in town suspects Fyodor r*ped her.

Before reading it I was familiarized with the passage of "The Great Inquisitor", which is a made up poem summary made by the character Ivan and usually hyped up as this great philosophical moment. It was a 20 pages ramble on the existence of God (succeeding another 20 pages ramble Ivan was spouting before).

The plot of the novel is simple. Dimitri is supposed to marry a fine woman but instead squanders all his money and hers on booze and whores, he ends up falling in love with Grushenka, the town bike, but it turns out Dimitri's dad is her sugar daddy.

This is a 19th century mystery crime novel, so everybody keeps foreshadowing out lout and with no subtlety that Dimitri is going to kill his father (he even beats the crap out of him at some point). The day before the crime the servant Smerdiakov (totally not the real murderer) tells Ivan that Dimitri knows the secret knock to enter his father's house because he told him so (supposedly was coerced to do it) and that on that same night he would suffer from an epileptic attack and Dimitri would enter and kill his father.

Mitia shows up at night, leaves with some money and bloody, buys a bunch of booze and goes to meet Gruchenka who's with a bunch of poles partying on a nearby town. The police arrives a few hours later and is heavily implied on Mitia's analysis that Smerdiakov did it but he acts like an r-slur during his interrogation dooming himself.

There's a bunch of other side stories, some of them amusing, others are just filler, and other details about Dimitri's interrogation and the crime scene but I'm not going to write an entire book out of it lol. I was wondering if the translations helped this book to become famous. I'm reading the Portuguese translation by Paulo Bezerra made for "Editora 34", it's the newest translation available and supposedly quite faithful to the original. The dialogue comes off as clunky (especially Dimitri's) but that could be incidental by the author.

So you guys may ask, is this book good? Is it bad? Is it worth a shot?

If you're familiarized with Dostoevsky and enjoyed his works you'll love it, but I feel like at least a couple hundred of pages (or maybe more) could be trimmed without making much of a difference. Maybe I'm too much of a to get his philosophy on how Christian Orthodoxy is the best thing ever and how the Russian folk is so pure. I still have the last part to finish but it's obvious Smierdiakov did it so is not really a twist.

Also, I have to say that Grushenka is a much entertaining whore than the saintly Sonya from C&P. She's unapologetic and is quite funny when she tells Alyosha she's totally saved and will leave her old life behind after a 5 minute talk with him.

!bookworms

Mine is Tightass Androgynous

(I just thought that up after remembering Titus Andronicus and I needed to share it somewhere)

This could have gone in /h/traditionalgames but you all be playing

I decided to read The Technological Republic by Palantir CEO Alex Karp for a few reasons:

1) I was a Palantir shareholder until about about a month ago

2) Karp's promotion of the book on CNBC made me think it might be filled with spicy takes

3) With the tech right's political prominence taking center stage as of late, this book seemed like a very relevant read that would perhaps MAYBE shed some light on the whirlwind we're experiencing in this administration.

The Technological Republic also happens to be the second book that Ive read originating from the Thielosphere, after Zero to One which was written by Thiel himself. Unlike The Technological Republic, Zero to One hardly advances any agenda and primarily focuses on identifying the shared characteristics of the most game-changing Silicon Valley startups that likely contributed to their success.

As far as the spiciness of the book goes, Id say its about a medium. I would expect someone fervently left of center to be at least slightly uncomfortable with it, but a neocon or older conservative democrat would probably not find the book super controversial. To me, it wasn't quite as biting of a polemic as the fervor in which Karp promoted his book in interviews made it sound like.

The Technological Republic reads about equal parts a manifesto and a sales pitch for Palantir in long-form for military and conservative-leaning government officials. The main points of the book in a nutshell are the following:

• Americans and the West as a whole have over time taken their postwar peace for granted, and alongside the influence of postwar intellectual movements of the 60s and onward this has lead to a lack of devotion of Westerners to a greater, national project. Our collective meaning we strive for has been reduced to a pursuit of a hollow egalitarianism and inclusion.

• America needs to develop killer AI to defend itself because it's inevitable that other nations will too.

• Big Tech should be married more closely to the government and pursue more projects in line with the collective good of the nation rather than solely the whims of the market. Silicon Valley is disproportionately focused on creating products that fulfill alleviating inconveniences and entertainment instead of technologies that serve the state and a general collective good, but may entail higher risk.

• The American government needs to adopt more of a consequentialist and pragmatic mindset. We've elevated bureaucratic piety, often selectively enforced, at the expense of being results-minded.

• A non-blood and soil based civic nationalism of sorts in which humans are tethered through a national purpose and shared culture is the best way to maintain large scale human community, otherwise it relies purely on the market to bind it together.

One can say that The Technological Republic is the wrong book at the wrong time, given the reckless hacking away at our government by the Trump Admin and DOGE, a Western identity under threat by Trump's behavior towards our allies in Europe and the remainder of North America, and a further increasing divisiveness at odds with creating the unifying national ideals that Karp advocates. And yet, Karp and Palantir are fully standing behind DOGE's actions and hedging their bets on the Trump Admin. Only time will tell, amidst all the confusion and upheaval, the ultimate fate of the technological republic that Karp envisions.

On the other-hand, perhaps the impending return of a multipolar world irrespective of Trump makes the need for a national identity and vision ultimately unavoidable and the dreams of libertarian globalism may have to be once again stashed for some time.

I do wish the book had a bit more depth and substance to a number of its arguments put forth, many of which rely on a small few cherry-picked examples for justification that I feel like Ive already heard repeatedly thrown around by the online tech right. For example, Karp makes use of Singapore as the model for civic nationalism, which alongside Dubai is parroted as an idealized society by libertarians and the broader tech right. I'm skeptical that such a model would work in the case of the US, which had streaks of nationalism without the need for an authoritarian dictator. I also find the degree to which Karp claims Silicon Valley is divorced from national interests a bit exaggerated and anyone who knows the workings of the valley knows that the biggest driver of profits usually don't come in via B2C, which doesnt line up well with Karp's assertion that Silicon valley has been reduced to addressing consumer inconveniences and entertainment.

One thing I haven't yet had a chance to do a deeper dive on is how Karp's intellectual origins tie into his vision. Karp was once a doctoral student under Jurgen Habermas, one of the most premier left-liberal thinkers in Europe, but later switched advisors over a disagreement. I personally don't know much about Habermas except for seeing his name dropped here and there by leftists. However, the book only mentions him once, alluding to his view that when governments fail to fulfill their promises, it can invoke a "crisis of legitimacy".

The bottom line: While it may not be among the most enlightening of books I've read, The Technological Republic is worth reading when it comes to examining the aims of the biggest players of the tech right.

excerpt

published 2 months ago and has 200 reviews how's that make u feel !writecel

Judging a book by its cover is good actually.

My favorite is the Swedish translation of the Tartar Desert.

Not just both, I just looked and he also does Latin, Italian, Sanskrit, Akkadian, and probably more. He must be a genius, a fraud, or ChatGPT

!bookworms !chuds

!bookworms but its whatever

my heart is telling me To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers

my heart is telling me @Aevann can you pls

!bookworms

@nuclearshill lost USAID funding for xer gender-affirming surgery and sadly ended xer life. I will run the weekly for the next few weeks

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

@Aevann can you pls

To discuss the 5th chapter of our bookclub current pick, "Petersburg" by Andrey Bely.

!bookworms

Nikolai Apollonovich and a glowie go to a bar, hilarity ensues. The footnotes mentioned that Bely referenced Dostoevsky and it shows, Pavel Yakovlevich conversation with Nikolai parallels that of Profiry Petrovich from C&P with Rodion Raskolnikov.

Foundation's Edge (1982) is a science fiction novel by American writer Isaac Asimov, the fourth book in the Foundation Series. It was written more than thirty years after the stories of the original Foundation trilogy, due to years of pressure by fans and editors on Asimov to write another,[2] and, according to Asimov himself, the amount of the payment offered by the publisher.

This doesn't sound particularly promising.

!bookworms

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

@Aevann can you pls