Book Post for October

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, star wars, this is a prussian education system hateblog

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: Not particularly interesting as a work of skepticism, unless you happen to have an interest in space aliens particularly for some reason. Fascinating as a look into the pre-New-Atheist skepticism movement.

Sagan pays a truly baffling amount of attention to what seem to me to be relatively unimportant kinds of woo, like psychic powers and alien abductions. Of course, neither psychic powers nor alien abductions are real, and it is better to not believe in them. But from my perspective there are far more important false beliefs that actually destroy lives. Sagan mentions false memories of abuse; equally important are certain incorrect medical beliefs (such as fraudulent cancer cures and anti-vaccine sentiment) and, of course, religion.

As someone who came of age as a skeptic around New Atheists, I am struck by Sagan’s restraint as regards religion. He several times makes arguments the logical implication of which is atheism, and then backtracks that there are many liberal religious believers who of course are very rational and accept evolution and support science. I don’t agree with all of Sam Harris’s excesses, but I think it is much more intellectually honest to say that the logical implication of skepticism is atheism.

Most interesting fact: quasars were originally believed to be aliens!

The Core: Teaching Your Child The Foundations of Classical Education: This is the worst homeschooling book I have ever read.

The author literally looked at the modern education system and said to herself, “what we really need is MORE pointless memorization and meaningless execution of rote techniques.” In the standard classical-education system, memorization is most of your education from first to fourth grade. After fourth grade education concentrates on logical reasoning and clear communication. The Core eliminates that frivolous “logical reasoning” and “clear communication” part of education and replaces it with more memorization.

It’s hard to say what the worst advice in this book is, because there are so many options. The Core advises requiring your child to do literally every math problem in their textbook, even if they have mastered the material and are complaining about being bored. (I literally cannot think of a better strategy to teach children to hate math.) History consists solely of memorization: memorizing the dates of 204 world events, memorizing the US presidents, memorizing “six stories of twelve sentences each” that summarize a major era, and copying and rewriting paragraphs from histories. (You do, also, get to read historical fiction.) Writing education consists of copying out sentences and paragraphs assigned by the teacher, memorizing a bunch of rules of grammar, and learning to write five-paragraph essays.

Star Wars: Thrawn: The greatest villain in Star Wars history has returned to his proper place in the canon. With the benefit of almost thirty years of hindsight, Zahn understands exactly what the reader wants out of a Thrawn book, which is more Thrawn. It was an absolute pleasure to open to a new chapter and realize that I didn’t have to return to reading about Luke or Leia or someone boring like that.

It is difficult to write a genius character; all too often, writers rely on technobabble or unjustified leaps of logic. Not so Thrawn. Zahn plays fair with the reader; Thrawn rarely has more information than the reader does, and in theory you could often figure out what his plan is before it is revealed, even though you rarely do. Nothing is left mysterious. Star Wars: Thrawn is wonderful and I am eager about starting the sequels.

[Here are spoilers for the Dark Lord’s Answer.]

Dark Lord’s Answer: A very cool premise, poorly executed. An economist 24/7 submissive is transported into a medieval fantasy world. Because sound economic advice is often counterintuitive or even evil-sounding, in order to get anyone to take her advice she had to set up shop as a Dark Lord. Because she’s an 24/7 submissive, she sets up a puppet Dark Lord whom she submits to while also being the power behind the throne.

Inexplicably, instead of choosing to explore this incredibly interesting character and teach the reader some economics along the way, Dark Lord’s Answer chooses to leave this as a ‘mystery’ the entire time and make it a big reveal.

Book Post for November

Tags

disability, joe haldeman, ozy blog post, polyamory, sex positivity, star wars, the trash of the thing

[Thanks to Picklefactory for getting me Chernow!]

Alexander Hamilton. Yep, that’s right, I am the trash of the thing.

I highly recommend reading Chernow if you’re a fan of Hamilton; there’s a lot of great character details and it’s very fun to see where Miranda drew his inspiration for various lines from. Things that didn’t make it into the musical: Hamilton/Lafayette; Hamilton confessing the Maria Reynolds affair to Jefferson and Madison, in salacious detail, while they said “…you really don’t need to tell us all of this…”; Hamilton supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, because he is my Problematic Fave; Hamilton is literally the only reason we have a functioning economic system; Burr and Eliza both had habits of staring at busts of Hamilton; Aaron Burr was a feminist; Aaron Burr filled his letters to his daughter with information about the hundreds of women he was sleeping with; Eliza consents to anything Angelica and Alexander might do together except that he love her more than he loves Eliza (“and that you are too reasonable to expect”).

One aspect which very much annoyed me is that Chernow has a different interpretation of Alexander Hamilton than I do, and so I spent a lot of time going “Wait, no, ‘Eliza adores both Angelica and Alexander’ is not a good argument for why her sister and her husband never had sex! Lots of people are extremely cheerful in the weeks leading up to a suicide attempt! Argh!”

The Forever War. Haldeman’s book is one of the most clever uses of a speculative element for a thematic purpose that I’ve ever seen. The book is about the feeling of coming back from Vietnam and everyone’s listening to different music and arguing about different political beliefs and making pop culture references you don’t get; the speculative element is (essentially) time dilation, so that when the hero gets back from the Space Wars society is literally two hundred years in the future. I very much appreciated the hero– a heterosexual– having to command soldiers from the heterophobic future who call him the Old Queer.

A Disability History of the United States. While I’m not familiar with Native American history enough to critique it properly, the chapter on Native Americans came off very much as “Native Americans are a culturally unified group of noble savages who all had the political views that I, the author, possess”. However, other chapters were fascinating: Deaf people briefly managed to convince the WPA that they ought to be an exception to its no-disabled-people rule on the grounds that they were not disabled but rather a minority linguistic community; deinstitutionalization was largely a product of conscientious objectors (a group selected for their idealism and altruism) working in asylums during World War II. Favorite passage, about a group of disabled soldiers in the Civil War:

In the midst of battle, Colonel Johnson’s commander sought reassurance from Johnson that his men would not retreat: “Will your invalids stand?” the general asked via a messenger. “Tell the general,” Johnson replied with deadpan humor, “that my men are cripples, and they can’t run.”

The Devil and Dan Cooley/Hell on High. Not nearly as good as the first book in the series; still enjoyable reads. Annoyingly, they do not feature Dayne, the protagonist of the first book, who is my favorite. And there isn’t nearly enough about Devil’s Point, the demon-run theme park. To be honest, I just want a five hundred page book explaining how the demon-run theme park works.

Heir to the Empire/Dark Force Rising. It is really great reading a book series that I’d last read in elementary school, because I keep having vague senses of “I think this character is evil” and “doesn’t this character end up getting married to the person she’s trying to murder?” and “oooh, I remember that scene!” Thrawn is, of course, the single best villain in Star Wars. Thrawn’s famous “studying species’s art to learn their weak points” strategy is actually mostly used for color and as a hook to make him a more memorable villain; Thrawn’s actual competence is mostly a product of the fact that he’s the only member of the entire Empire to have read a management guide other than How To Kill Friends And Influence People Via Force-Choking. Also I continue to have a crush on Mara Jade.

More Than Two. A very good polyamory advice book sadly marred by its psychiatric ableism. The section on dating mentally ill people, summarized: “you have to disclose your mental illness or if you’re a caregiver of a mentally ill person. Don’t become your partner’s therapist. Mental health issues can make relationships difficult and sometimes intractable.” I mean, I don’t disagree with any of that (except maybe the bit about therapy, which sort of comes off as “it’s okay to support your partner about Regular Sad, but as soon as it becomes a special Crazy Sad you have to call in a trained professional”). However, it seems to me like one also ought to put in “and also many poly people are in happy relationships with mentally ill people. Polyamory can be good for mentally ill people, because it allows them to spread out the burden of caretaking more easily. And being a relatively functional crazy person gives you a head start on all the CBT skills we spent the rest of this book explaining,” all of which are also true and give a little more balanced perspective on dating crazy people. (Also, it kept talking about “enabling” mentally ill people to not seek treatment, which, ugh.)

The best part of reading advice books, of course, is finding out all of the horrible life choices you’re not making. More Than Two delivers: from the man who told his heterosexual wife “we’ll have a one penis policy and you’ll become bisexual!” to the man who saw his wife come home happy from a first date and then forbade her from ever speaking to the person she went out with again to the man with a forty-five-page list of rules that his partners had to abide by. I think the common thread in a lot of these relationships is people who have managed to go through their entire lives without realizing that “Person did Thing, which caused me to be upset” is not the same thing as “Person did something wrong”, much less “I have a right to forbid Person from ever doing Thing again”. I would suggest that this is perhaps a sign that one ought not date neurotypicals, on account of most of us crazy people figure that out by the time we’re sixteen, but unfortunately I am not as much of a jerk as the authors of More Than Two.

The Whole Lesbian Sex Book. Fun fact: I first read this book in middle school when I had just figured out I was bisexual and, like a good nerd, had gone to research the subject of having sex with girls in the library. It’s a pretty comprehensive introduction: it covers everything from the exact mechanics of fisting to to how to make sure your sex parties are disability-friendly. (Do you have an ASL interpreter, by any chance?) While some of the information is out of date– the only thing that changes faster than Internet resources is acceptable trans terminology– overall it’s a book I’d recommend to most women who are considering having sex with women.