(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best history books

Okay, here is a copy/paste of a comment I made previously:

"The Principles of Communism" by Friedrich Engels was an early draft of the Manifesto that many feel is actually easier to understand. I still recommend reading the manifesto as well if you haven't yet.

Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein and The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde are two short, simple, and very eloquent introductory essays that everyone should read.


"Marx for Beginners" by Rius is an illustrated book explaining the history and basics of Marx's ideas. I know it sounds absurd that it's basically like a comic book, but it seriously does a great job of concisely stating a lot of the basics. I recommend it to all beginners.

"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" by Engels. It outlines socialism and distinguishes the scientific socialism of Marx/Engels from the utopian socialism that preceded it.

"Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism" by Bertrand Russell analyzes several different leftist views and their origins. Russell has a simple, reasonable way of explaining things. I don't agree with him on everything, but he does his best to be fair when explaining things and it is a valuable introductory work.

"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" by Engels. This does what it says on the tin.

One of the best things to get is the Marx-Engels Reader. It contains "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" and many of the other works by Marx and Engels that I and others mention. (Here it is for free)

Everything I've listed so far, with the exception of "Principles of Scientific Socialism" and "Roads To Freedom" is a pretty short read.

Here's some slightly more advanced reading:

"Wage Labor and Capital" and "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" by Marx

"The Holy Family" by Marx and Engels

State and Revolution by Lenin

Once you're informed enough, it's definitely worth is to read through Marx's Capital with these David Harvey lectures as a guide.

Also, this guy's youtube channel has been a great help to me. I've especially found his series on the Law of Value to be very useful lately but he has tons of great videos. His videos on manufacturing consent, crisis, commodities, and credit are just a few good examples. If you go to his website you can see a list of all his videos on the right hand side. He's certainly not perfect, but he's helped me to learn a lot and helped to point me to other resources as well.


Edit: Found free copies of Marx for Beginners and Marx-Engels reader, added links. Now I link to free copies of every work I mention but one. Free education, comrades!

Edit2: I've rearranged this some and tried to order it better. I removed one book since it's hard to find and out of print but here's the description I had of it:

"Principles of Scientific Socialism" by Philip Sharnoff. I haven't been able to find this book to order online... maybe it's out of print, but I picked it up at a used book store and it's pretty great. It concisely explains all about Marxism, Leninism and modern socialist movements. I like it because he uses more or less plain English and gets straight to the point. It even goes into basic history about the Russian and Chinese Revolution, the USSR and the cold war. It's really fantastic. I'm sure there are other books that do this and if anyone knows of them, let me know. I'd love to find one to recommend that is in print.

No problem! As for some good reading that is pretty non-technical but still really delves into the manned space programs, I would highly recommend "A Man On The Moon", by Andrew Chaikin. It is appreciated as being one of the best breakdowns of the Apollo Program, and is a great read filled with a ton of interesting information.

Also, ANY of the astronaut auto-biographies are fantastic. As for a few examples, Eugene Cernan's "The Last Man On The Moon" is a great and candid read in my opinion, as is Neil Armstrong's "First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong". Chris Hadfield's "An Astronauts Guide To Life On Earth" is also excellent and very candid and open as well, covering a lot of stuff about STS and ISS. "Failure Is Not An Option", written by former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz, is also a great read that gets into a lot of the NASA mission management from Mercury to Apollo, and likewise with astronaut Deke Slayton's great bio titled "Deke!", since Slayton was NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations after he was grounded due to a heart issue, making him largely responsible for crew assignments at NASA during Gemini and Apollo.

Another good one is "This New Ocean" by William Burrows. It covers the history of humankind's fascination with spaceflight and rocketry, from the ancient myths of Daedalus and Icarus and the early chinese experiments with fireworks right up to the STS shuttle and ISS, and goes into not just mission specifics, but the historical geo-politics and geo-military wranglings that really defined the first "Space Race" with the Soviets.

Actually, here is a link to a list of a bunch of good books written by or about astronauts and the space programs, and just about every book on this list I would recommend.

Also, if you have not yet seen it, I STRONGLY recommend that you check out the fantastic HBO mini-series "From The Earth To The Moon". Produced and directed by Tom Hanks and Ron Howard with a star-studded cast, this 12-episode critically acclaimed mini-series is extremely accurate historically, and covers the entirety of the Apollo Program, from before the Apollo 1 fire to Apollo 17's final steps on the lunar surface. It is basically like Tom Hanks and Ron Howard's other fantastic mini-series "Band of Brothers", but rather than covering WWII, it focuses on Apollo and the race to the Moon. I cannot recommend that mini-series enough, as it is brilliant produced, directed, and acted, and, above all, historically accurate.

There are far too many to describe one as "the best", but here are some of my favourites.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a well deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A combination of history, science and biography and so very well written.

A few of my favourite biographies include the magisterial, and also Pulitzer Prize winning, Peter the Great by Robert Massie. He also wrote the wonderful Dreadnaught on the naval arms race between Britain and Germany just prior to WWI (a lot more interesting than it sounds!). Christopher Hibbert was one of the UK's much loved historians and biographers and amongst his many works his biography Queen Victoria - A Personal History is one of his best. Finally, perhaps my favourite biography of all is Everitt's Cicero - The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician. This man was at the centre of the Fall of the Roman Republic; and indeed fell along with it.

Speaking of which, Rubicon - The Last Years of the Roman Republic is a recent and deserved best-seller on this fascinating period. Holland writes well and gives a great overview of the events, men (and women!) and unavoidable wars that accompanied the fall of the Republic, or the rise of the Empire (depending upon your perspective). :) Holland's Persian Fire on the Greco-Persian Wars (think Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes! Think of the Movie 300, if you must) is equally gripping.

Perhaps my favourite history book, or series, of all is Shelby Foote's magisterial trilogy on the American Civil War The Civil War - A Narrative. Quite simply one of the best books I've ever read.

If, like me, you're interested in teh history of Africa, start at the very beginning with The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman (both famous paleoanthropologists). Whilst not the very latest in recent studies (nothing on Homo floresiensis for example), it is still perhaps the best introduction to human evolution available. Certainly the best I've come across. Then check out Africa - Biography of a Continent. Finish with the two masterpieces The Scramble for Africa on how European colonialism planted the seeds of the "dark continents" woes ever since, and The Washing of the Spears, a gripping history of the Anglo-Zulu wars of the 1870's. If you ever saw the movie Rorke's Drift or Zulu!, you will love this book.

Hopkirk's The Great Game - The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia teaches us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I should imagine that's enough to keep you going for the moment. I have plenty more suggestions if you want. :)

>As for your “race realist” beliefs, the way I see those theories is that they are backwards rationalization of “innate” human capacities based on results of recent history (a time period that accounts as a mere tick on the entire span of human time-line). It also does not take account the effects of disparity in starting points of geography and environment, and different available starting packages offered by said environments.

They're not backwards rationalizations for the results of recent history. Evolution never stopped, different selection pressures have been placed on different lineages of humans ever since they diverged some 40-50k years ago when the group that became our ancestors (all none Africans) marched out of Africa. And the theory of course takes into account varying geography and environments, in fact they were the very driving force behind the evolution of different population traits or averages. Culture and biology are intertwined, they can and in fact have co-evolved with each other throughout our evolutionary history. If you're open to learning more about this, The 10,000 Year Explosion is a good primer on the topic of recent human evolution. It is an easy (even if you have little knowledge on genetics) and succinct read, but is definitely compelling in the theories it puts forth as they are backed up by ample evidence.

>if you want to subscribe to “race-realist” beliefs, then you might as well save the effort and just kowtow to the white man's self-researched “Goldilocks superiority”, and accept your current lot in life as a second/third class worker drone. After all, if “race-realism” is real, then everything as manifested in the status quo is the natural order of things right? Why struggle instead of just accepting the world order? It's yet another comfortable trap of contentment to curl up in after all.

You speak of "subscribing to 'race-realist' beliefs" as if it's some religion one can just choose to follow or not. It's either science or it's not, and if the former, then I have no choice but to "subscribe" to it. For every group of people, there are theories in the race realism framework that would make them uneasy and perhaps feel some sort of immediate revulsion to. But at the end of the day, how one feels about these theories are completely irrelevant, if the research methodologies are sound (which after having read many books and studies on both sides of the debate, I've deemed to be so), then the ensuing results and conclusions must be incorporated into our understanding of the world. Admittedly not all aspects of racial differences are well studied, which is exactly why they should be, science and knowledge in itself is neither good nor evil, morality only comes into play when it's time for their application. And again, just as evolution never stopped at the advent of human cultures, it continues to enact itself even today, and will continue to do so for as long as humans exist. So just because the white man might be the "Goldilocks" currently, doesn't mean Asians cannot become strictly better in every genetic metric that matters via the application of science. So no, understanding race realism does not at all necessitates one to "just accept the world order".

>Empathy could be useful for knowing your enemy, know what makes them tick, and devise how to deal with them. Going beyond that becomes sympathizing with them, a pit of no return where you become their useful idiot.

Yes point taken. But again, I'm not at all advocating for Asians to put their necks out on the line for them right now (or ever if one chooses not to), but rather once our position is secured, why not help the other groups of people? It is the moral thing to do. There's little to be gained from being cruel masters.

>As for morality, I got only one word: Lol. We Asians are family-oriented though, so save that morality for your loved ones.

This ties back to my earlier point that humanity is an extended family. You don't treat all members of your family the same, do you? Of course not, that would be impossible. Some you like more, some you like less. Some you treat better and help out more, others you're simply indifferent to. But at the end of the day, they're still your family members. Barring unforgivable transgressions, you would not usually wish irreversible ills upon any member. And so it goes for me when it comes to humanity.

>Why is it always individuals from the losing side that talks about reconciling with everyone to sing cum bah yah? Why is it that Asians, the most ridiculed race on planet earth, who have the least reason to want to reconcile, have most people among them that want reconciliation?

Hopefully you realize by now that's not the message I was trying to convey. No illusions of pleading and begging the victor for pity and scraps on my end here. The future goal is exactly that, for the future, after we get our own shit taken care of. East Asians are well on their way to reclaiming the throne for the top civilizational center of the world. The dominance of the West over Asia is an aberration through the lens of history.

>You want to change the rules of the game from zero-sum (the way history and nature had operated since inception) to something else? At the very least, you have to be in charge in order to have any chance of changing the rules.

Precisely. This was implicitly stated in my previous comment, guess it wasn't clear enough.

>And all this without even having to look at how all utopian ideals fail to address how to change human nature to make that utopia work.

I don't believe in Utopias, because that implies there is some idealized final destination for society, which goes against science. And yes human nature needs to be changed for the better, it will continue to evolve, just as it has always done so. But if science and technology grants us the choice to direct it to a course that would be beneficial for all of humanity, why not take it?

>then we are eagerly wanting to break bread and seek commonality with white nationalists.

In general, Nationalists (who love their own) are not Supremacists (who hate and oppress others), this applies to nationalists of all races, whether they be Asian, white, brown or black. And if they follow similar core beliefs as those that I outlined, which many do, then they can definitely be reasoned with and made into allies for the common Human Nationalist cause. I'd die for my family, have love my people, and do good for humanity.

>What “unique strengths” would that be? Whites are more adept at leadership? Asians at being mental workhorses? Blacks at being physical workhorses? Latinos at keeping the spaceship decks immaculate?

Lol. Not everyone needs to work or even be on the spaceship. In any case, by the time such efforts become feasible, the state of science and technology (especially wrt automation) would likely be very different from that of today, so it's rather pointless to speculate about it now.

I'm a little late to the party here, but can't resist posting, because as a fan of ship fic in general and slash fic in particular, this argument is one of my pet peeves:

>What I'm getting at is it makes your understanding of the relationships of characters very shallow. For instance, the whole point of Sam and Frodo's relationship in LotR is that it's the purest form of friendship. Sam is able to commit selfless acts and simply doesn't care if he comes off as too attached to his friend, it's beautifully innocent. It loses everything if secretly Sam just wants to have his way with Frodo.

To be honest, I consider this a rather sad and immature point of view. Platonic and romantic love are different, yes, but platonic love is not somehow "purer" or more selfless than romantic love. When you love somebody romantically, sex is one more expression of your love for them. It is not the be-all-and-end-all of everything you do for them! You can want to get into somebody's pants and commit selfless acts for them at the same time.

Additionally, as others have already mentioned, portrayals of openly LGBT relationships were forbidden in films and other broadcast media for decades and were rare in other types of media as well, so for many years, writing slash fic about non-canon relationships was the only way that LGBT fans could have any media representation at all. Even today, with LGBT characters and relationships finally becoming more mainstream in the media, choosing to interpret a same-sex relationship that is canonically platonic as romantic can add interesting layers to fanfics about them. For example, my favorite slash ship is Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes from the Captain America films. Choosing to make them bisexual or gay opens up all sorts of interesting story opportunities dealing with queer life in NYC in the 30s and 40s and in the military in WW2.

Yes! I'm a student studying RPG design, so I like to think I have at least a vague idea of what I'm talking about.

Some various sources, some paid and some free:

• Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore, a series of old blog posts by Vincent Baker. A lot of this stuff is boiled-down versions of what the Forge--which others have mentioned--was all about.
  
  
• Second Person by Herrigan and Wardrip-Fruin; it's a bunch of essays about roleplaying and roleplaying games. It covers both digital and tabletop, so it's a little all over the place, but it is quite good.
  
  
• Playing at the World by Jon Peterson. It's a huge history of roleplaying games and related games, which covers less hard theory than it does the evolution of the game itself. Super helpful if you're into the history, less so if you're not.
  
  
• #rpgtheory on Twitter. There's definitely some flak in there, but it's also definitely worth checking on every week or two, to see if there's been any good threads popping up.
  
  
• The Arts of LARP, by David Simkins. This is LARP-focused, but it has a lot of good stuff on roleplaying in general, especially the more philosophical angles.
  
  
• ars ludi, Ben Robbins' blog. He writes about all sorts of stuff, but if you go through the archives and find the green-triangle'd and starred posts, those are the sort of 'greatest hits.'
  
  
• Role-Playing Game Studies, by Zagal and Deterding. This is another collection of essays (which includes some stuff by Simkins and Peterson, too, IIRC) and is kind of the go-to for this sort of thing.
  
  
• And the Forge, as mentioned by others.
  
  That's a pretty good list of theory and texts and stuff.
  
  One of the ways to learn good RPG theory, I've found, though, is to just read good RPGs.
  
  It's also highly worth digging through acknowledgements and credits of your favorite RPGs and then tracking down the names mentioned. If you're reading a big, hefty RPG, like D&D, pay special attention to any consultants, specialists, or other people listed under strange credit areas.
  
  Anyway, when you eventually dig your way through all of this, I'll probably have read some more, so hit me up if you want more suggestions. Those top seven or eight things are probably the best place to start.
  
  Edit: my personal list of games was rather reductive, as several commentators have called me out on, so I've removed it. Go read lots of RPGs.

There are a couple of 'strands' of Marx's thought which you might investigate. I can't comment too much on shorter introductions to the philosophical side, as I'm more familiar with (and interested in, for the moment) works the economic side. For this, I can recommend the following:

• A Short History of Socialist Economic Thought by Gerd Hardack, Dieter Karras, Ben Fine. It's all in the title :)
  
• David Harvey's excellent A Companion to Marx's Capital. This certainly isn't a short book, but Harvey is a terrific writer, and so the time flies. I would also point to and highly recommend the series of lectures on which this book is based. Of course, the lectures are hardly an exercise in brevity, but they are very good and worthwhile.
  
• Ernest Mandel's An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory is good. Read it online here. Any Mandel is very good. He is an incredible clear author, and he really knows Marxist thought inside out. For instance, I would also recommend Ernest Mandel's introduction to the Penguin edition of Capital (the introduction is a bit shorter than the whole book of Mandels that I've mentioned above) very nicely summarises the context of his economic thought, and gives an overview thereof.
  
• Yannis Varoufakis (the former finance minister of Greece) wrote a fantastic, more general introduction to economics and economic theory called Foundations of Economics: A beginner’s companion. While Varoufakis deals with economics as a whole, and discusses, for instance, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, this serves to very well position Marx within the economic milieu of his time. This is a recurring theme for a reason: to understand Marx, I believe that it's imperative to understand what drove Marx to ruthlessly critique capitalism.
  
• Finally, I'm not trying to be glib or conceited by suggesting The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.), edited by Robert C. Tucker. This is the book that I used to start studying seriously the thought of Marx and Engels, after reading Singer's introduction. I recommend the book because it has (again) a wonderful introduction, the works that are presented are quite short, and each work has a solid introduction. This is a very good volume for seeing the trajectory and evolution of Marx and Engels's economic thought without having to dive into the larger works. The book even has a very heavily reduced version of Capital vol. I. This book also deals with the philosophy of Marx more heavily than the other works I've recommended here, as it contains a number of earlier philosophical works (including the Grundisse, which is practically the philosophical sister to Capital).
  
  I hope these will be useful, even if they aren't necessarily the aspect of Marx that you are most interested in.
  
  Edit: I should state that I am a philosopher of language, and so one doesn't need any especial economics expertise to dive into the texts that I've recommended! I certainly knew very little about the field before I read these texts.

I am not totally sure what you are asking for actually exists in book form...which is odd, now that I think about it.

If it were me, I would think about magazines instead. And if you really want to push him, think about the following options:

1. Science News, which is very similar to the front-matter of the leading scientific journal Science. This includes news from the past month, and some in-depth articles. It is much better written -- and written at a much higher level -- than Scientific American or Discover. For a very intelligent (and science-interested) high school student, this should pose little difficulty.
   
2. The actual journal Science. This is weekly, which is nice. In addition to the news sections, this also includes editorials and actual science papers. While many of the actual papers will be beyond your son, he can still see what passes for presentation of data in the sciences, and that is cool.
   
3. The actual journal Nature. This is also weekly, and is the british version of the journal Science. In my opinion, the news section is better written than Science, which is important as this is where your kid's reading will be mostly done. IN addition, Nature always has sections on careers and education, so that your son will be exposed to the more human elements of science. Finally, the end of nature always has a 1-page sci-fi story, and that is fun as well.
   
4. If you must, you could try Scientific American or Discover, but if you really want to give your kid a cool gift, that is a challenge, go for one of the top three here. I would highly recommend Nature.
   
   If you insist on books...
   
   I see you already mentioned A Brief History of the Universe, which is an excellent book. However, I am not sure if you are going to get something that is more "in depth." Much of the "in depth" stuff is going to be pretty pop, without the rigorous foundation that are usually found in textbooks.
   
   If I had to recommend some books, here is what I would say:
   
   
5. The selfish gene is one of the best "rigorous" pop-science books out there. Dawkins doesn't really go into the math, but other than that he doesn't shy away from the implications of the work.
   
6. Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett is a great book. While not strictly science, per se, it does outline good philosophical foundations for evolution. It is a dense read, but good.
   
7. On the more mathematical side, you might try Godel, Escher, Bach, which is a book that explores the ramifications of recrusiveness and is an excellent (if dense) read.
   
8. You could also consider books on the history of science -- which elucidate the importance of politics and people in the sciences. I would recommend any of the following: The Double Helix, A man on the moon, The making of the atomic bomb, Prometheans in the lab, The alchemy of air, or A most damnable invention. There are many others, but these came to mind first.
   
   Hope that helps! OH AND GO WITH THE SUBSCRIPTION TO NATURE
   
   edit: added the linksssss

>Can you produce enough to overwhelm the examples of large populations living peaceably for an extended period of time WITH a central authority that I can produce?

I'm not quite sure if the following answers this question, but here it goes: I don't think central authorities have either the incentives or the ability to help large populations cooperate.

Centralization of political authority often leads to tyranny because rulers of large populations (and geographical areas) have little to fear from loosing citizens to free surrounding polities. I prefer decentralization to centralization because it leads to a sort of competition between Governments which results in more human freedom. Many historians partially credit the decentralized political order in Europe following the fall of Rome with the rise of an advanced Western Civilization.

See more here

Moreover, when decision making for a large group of people is centralized, the decisions coming from the top usually fail to take into account the practical facts of the situations in which they're applied. Austrian economists refer to this as the economic calculation problem. It was mainly applied to the Socialists, but it applies to basically any centralized group making decisions. I remember hearing my father who worked for Pfizer (a large pharmaceutical corporation) always complaining about his bosses. Listening to him, you'd think Pfizer made it's best efforts to pick the least qualified people for management positions. However this wasn't the case. The reality was that because decision making at Pfizer was centralized, the decisions made by the management made no sense to those further down the line because the management didn't have the ability to take into account all the details that should have been considered in making their decisions. The same principles illustrated above apply both to large corporations and to governments, this is why so many people find Dilbert to be a funny comic.

>How about modern Iceland, which is definitely a state? How about Portugal, New Zealand, Canada, and the Scandanavian nations?

As much as I'd like to claim to be an expert on these countries and their current economic and political climates, I simply do not know much about them, so I'd recommend asking someone else.

>Can you counter the suggestion that a central authority is necessary for the kind of cooperation that produces roadways, a common language, a common economy, higher learning, and all of the benefits that these bring?

With regard to the public goods problem which you allude to in this question, I recommend this video which basically explains that public goods do not have to be funded via governmental compulsion. Roderick T. Long (the guy who wrote the essay read in the video) states that there are other methods, such as appealing to the conscience of people who use the good (he gives the example of church goers), packaging the public good with private goods, and a few others. Regarding language, I don't believe any State can be credited with the creation of a language. From skimming this wikipedia entry it appears that the exact origins are unknown, but that it was developed organically as people evolved and cooperated with one another. Regarding a common economy, all an economy is is the sum total of transactions among a large group of people. Since the division of labor arises naturally, it should surprise no one that an economy will follow. From my limited knowledge of history, it seems that the role of states has generally been to limit the economy by raising tariffs on foreign goods to protect politically connected producers in their respective polities.

>Would you agree that the primary reasons the succeeded for as long as they did was due to isolation and not requiring a defensive stance against invaders? How would we propose to adapt anarcho-capitalism to accommodate non-isolated areas that do have to adopt a defensive stance?

Isolation certainly helps anarchic societies evade states. I recently read a great book on this topic found on amazon which theorizes that the indigenous tribes in Southeast Asia formed their social structures in such a way as to avoid being enslaved and expropriated by the States that existed in the valleys. For example, they preferred to grow root plants which are easy to hide and maintain, as opposed to rice, which is difficult to hide from tax collectors and difficult to maintain. So yes, isolation and the "friction of the terrain" make it easier to avoid State power. Although the author doubts this applies as much in our modern era with all weather roads and aircraft.

With regard to the issues of defense in non-isolated areas, I think the best strategy is to have a well-armed populace which is more difficult to conquer, as well as private security agencies that pose enough of an inconvenience to invaders that the invasion would be too expensive to the invaders. An An-Cap economist, Bob Murphy wrote a couple of essays on this topic found here that deals with this issue (as well as law) in more detail.

> It may not be the profs. Student organizations are pretty popular here and many of them are very much ideological. I've seen at my uni that people joined a student org for their good marketing, network and famous parties then started to hold those views more and more themselves.

That's not the university or student organizations as much as it is people. People like to feel ideologically actualized. That's not a symptom of youth or studenthood nearly as much as it is symptomatic of humanity. I don't know how much experience you have outside of school (and I don't mean that to insult you, I just don't know you!), but my experience in the "real world" before going back to grad school is that if anything these kinds of ideological organizations are even more prevalent (insofar as them existing across spectra of activity and ideology). I lived in Washington, DC for a while before this and the amount of political clubs was just insane, but they're even in areas like rural Alaska and Florida.

> Personally I don't think that a communist society is viable in anything larger than a kibbutz (which I'd call a community, not society) because it goes against human nature and has significant technical difficulties regarding efficient and sufficient production.

I emphatically agree with this. I generally find communism an interesting framework to operate under, but it's almost impossible for me to see it applicable on any way on a grand scale. I have a rather pessimistic view of humanity - not that I believe humans are inherently evil or wrong, but that doing the right thing is often difficult and that peoples' definitions of what is "right" are different and applied differently. This getting a bit into a diatribe, but I'd say my personal identification is closer to classical anarchism/libertarianism (NOT what modern American libertarianism is, which has almost nothing to do with the ideology) for the reasons you describe.

> ...classes based on economics are not the only way to stratify a society. In the USA it was also races, in Eastern Europe it was ethnicities, language and religion. Even if all workers had the same rights, a Russian was still "culturally superior" to a Lithuanian. People have other loyalties than to their class, and this is something that I think Marx was wrong about.

This is actually something Marx writes about with Engels and something he'd agree with you on. Marx did not state that economics was the only way to interpret history, but that it was one of the main forces of the "modern" era. He makes a point that stratification through race, religion, and ethnicity are all just as salient, but that economics was the one that oppressors could wield most strongly. The idea that Marx exclusively focused on economic stratification is something that's come from misinterpretation of his writings, and I've noticed that's mostly in literature coming since the 1980s - which probably coincides with the rise of neoliberalism in the West.

> Do you mean that the workers in some countries became accomplices of the capitalists, and a strong party with a strong leader is needed to keep the movement "pure"? Surely in the top 10 conspiracy theories.

Sort of. This is one of the big differences between Marxism and Leninism. Marx emphatically believed that workers fighting against the capitalists must occur organically, and that any attempt to manufacture revolution would end up being a fake revolution that would end up being more dangerous and destructive in the long run (ironic, isn't it?). This was a strong reaction against the "great man" theory of the Enlightenment, which postulated that history is moved by the actions of "great men" and personae. Marx, on the other hand, believed that history was moved by class struggles - with "class" primarily operating under the economic definition but also including issues of race, nationality, and sex. That's one of several reasons why you'll see Leninism described as "not real communism", because it violates one of Marx's central tenants that revolution must come from the people and be sustained by the people, as any revolution stemming from a figure would end up becoming by and for the figure.

Seriously it's fascinating stuff, even if you or I don't subscribe to the political/ideological aspect of it. It's legitimately interesting reading, and you can get a cheap copy of collected works here if you don't feel like reading through several hundred pages of Das Capital (and I wouldn't recommend you do so).

> I'm an economist but I don't think that everything can be explained by economics.

I was a healthcare economist before starting grad school, and I think geographical inequalities (but not inequities) do better at influencing economic behavior. Most people look at economics as being the driver of human political and social behavior in the last couple of decades, but I think it's more like a descendant of a common variable (geography) than anything else.

> I'm a huge advocate of welfare economics and sustainable finance. The first one is concerned with using human welfare instead of GPD as a measure of economic success. The second uses environmental impact in the calculation of financial feasibility of projects.

Do you have any books or authors you'd recommend? I'm taking a course on sustainability that mostly focuses on health behavior, but I'd like to learn a bit more on the sustainability of welfare and environment.

By the way, I'm enjoying this talk with you. I like having to think critically about things I've read or experienced, and I'm definitely getting that this morning! I sincerely apologize for my initial frustration.

Great questions. I don't think there's an easy or foolproof answer to them.

>should lay people who have zero expertise in a field trust such general academic consensuses as being broadly correct?

Broadly correct? I would think that's a solid way to look at things. I'm in agreement with you.

>Are there good reasons for non-experts to be skeptical about the scientific consensus on vaccines, climate change or evolution?

"Good" reasons? Eh........I'll give a few scattered thoughts here:

• Some people are just going to be contrarians. I don't have any sources to link at the moment, but I think we've all encountered this at some point.
  
• Other people, often those who feel they have been marginalized by society (ex. white people who watched their friends go to college but couldn't go themselves—I'm referring to my own mother in this case), have a deep longing for "secret knowledge" and the sense of power it brings. Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy gives one of the breakdowns of this phenomenon while Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American History (1966) shows that none of this is new. For people who usually possess traits we associate with intelligence (they are intensely curious and often willing to reading extensively) but who feel like they have been unfairly excluded from the centers of intellectual life, the idea that that everyone but them has it wrong is a bit intoxicating. Especially when a small groups of other marginalized people begin listening to them. I am not justifying this phenomenon—it probably shares some of the same social DNA as the incel movement—but I am trying to humanize it.
  
• In addition to these two groups (contrarians and the intellectually marginalized), we might also add those people who have been turned off by the fervency and (please, don't throw anything at me) fundamentalist fanaticism of some popular science devotees. While 99% of modern people simply go about their days with a fairly healthy view of science and knowledge, we are all aware of the loud fringe who wants to paint anyone who disagrees with them as a "science denier" and launch social media crusades against them. Again, I'm trying to use a scalpel here and not a broad brush—it's the militant defenders of Scientism who have (like their religious counterparts) managed to turn some people off.
  
• Then there are what I like to "gut thinkers." These often genuinely good and kind-hearted people often make decisions (like whether to vaccinated their kids or not) based on emotion rather than strict reason. For them, there is nothing in the world more important than their child and the idea of their child being harmed by something they chose to do terrifies them. While they might not ever realize it, they operate in a similar fashion to those people in the "Trolley Problem" who refuse to pull the lever and save some lives because then someone would be dying as a direct result of their action. These people often hear conflicting stories (vaccines are safe vs vaccines cause illnesses) and it troubles their gut to the point where, rather than sitting down to rationalize a solution, they avoid the issue or default to whatever option requires the least amount of direct action.
  
• Lastly we might add those people who would otherwise accept scientific findings but who have one or two core beliefs or predispositions that can complicate things. For example, while we commonly label American fundamentalists as "anti-science," anyone working in that field knows from the work of the eminent George Marsden that they are rather ardently pro-Baconian science—meaning that they absolutely love empirical, directly observable science based on inductive reasoning. What they reject is deductive science and its long-range projections both forwards and backwards in time. I can say from experience that understanding this and acknowledging it in discussions with these people does wonders for the conversation and really disarms a lot of suspicion.
  
• I don't know that there is a perfect solution here, but one possible approach would be to start affirming "folk culture" within modern society. I'm literally just tossing this one out here and I expected it to be a bit controversial, but maybe it will stimulate some discussion. In essence, we (as modern, scientific Westerners) usually don't find it problematic to acknowledge, accommodate, and affirm indigenous forms of knowledge. In fact, we often condemn those who try to "Westernize" others for being colonial or destroying culture. For those who belong to tribes or ethnic enclaves, practicing non-scientific forms of knowledge is seen as a good thing by most of the intellectual elites in the West. But for those born into Western society, there is little socially-acceptable opportunity to seek out and develop alternative forms of knowledge. Perhaps creating a safe social arena for such a "folk culture" to re-emerge could give these above groups a healthy and socially legitimate avenue for exploring and fulfilling some of their deep unmet needs without the subversiveness that presently undermines a lot of the good work that science is doing.

> I see where you're coming from, but with Trump now at over 40% in polls against 12 or 13 other candidates, I'd say it's the GOP's loyalties that aren't in line with the party.

I'd agree, but generally, when such situations happen, the party elites generally have more sway than the general public. That's the general thesis of this book. There are tons of situations where the poll-leader ended up losing the nomination.

Basically, the party can act as a biased referee in a sports match. They have a lot of ability to manipulate how decisions are made or adjust schedules or scenarios to essentially penalize candidates they don't like, and donate money to PACs for or against candidates.

That's the reason people like McCain and Romney usually end up winning. They're more appealing to the establishment, for lack of a better term. Trump isn't as appealing because he is unlikely to keep in line for the sake of the party or the benefits of the higher ups in the party.

Trump actually winning would be very unprecedented and the first time really in modern history that such an upset happened. The party clearly wanted Bush or Christie, and Rubio is kind of controversial as a backup as he leans toward Tea Party. Trump might end up happening because party elites seem more focused on stopping Cruz than Trump and can't decide on a candidate.

> taking the 2000 year figure, that's getting awfully close to the KJV (1611AD).

So taking "the 2000 year figure" to go from alleged composition to the first manuscript is comparable to the distance from the composition of the gospels to a popular English translation of a Latin translation of the original Greek how?

>You'll need a source for that, every contemporary historian agrees the earliest scroll dates to at least 30 years, and most claim it's more like 60.

Well I was thinking of 7Q5, which was in an area abandoned in 68 and dated by papyrologists to the first half of the first century, but it's a small fragment and not without controversy. There's a more recent (c. 2012) find that has been dated by one paleographer to the second half of the first century, but apparently hasn't been sufficiently examined by others... I've neither seen it discredited or publicized as confirmed.

Since those are both "iffy" sources, I don't mind sticking to 30 instead of 10-20 ... considering paper lasts several hundred years properly cared for, I don't think 30 years is long enough to require a whole lot of copying distance from the originals. I mean ... I have books on my shelf written on cheap wood pulp that are closer to a century than a half-century old (and that haven't been considered holy) and if I wanted to copy them I could; I'm not sure why it's expected that a copy 50-100 years from the originals would have had time to pick up a lot of errors... that doesn't make sense to me.

But why does it matter to you? If you are acknowledging that it's reasonable to care whether it's 10-20 vs. 30-60, then aren't you implicitly saying that it's not intellectually dishonest to consider provenance dates as a reason to believe one document over another?

>To pretend that 2000 years of closely preserved mnemonics will somehow specifically crumble Krishna's resurrection account is not only silly, but entirely unfounded.

If you want to disagree that oral tradition (even with "closely preserved mnemonics") is just as reliable as having a written copy of something and copying it letter for letter, then it's your prerogative to have that opinion... even if we think each other "silly" I don't think that leaves either of us in a position to accuse the other of intellectual dishonesty... just poor reasons for (honestly) believing or disbelieving things, right?

And I haven't seen a response to the idea that oral tradition shouldn't be considered as trustworthy as written copies, but regardless of that, in the 2500 years before the mnemonics began, from there to when the events supposedly happened, is also a big enough gap. Most info I've seen place him at around 3000 BC, if it took from then to 500 for the account of his life to be recorded, that's 2500 years of time for exaggeration to slip in... again, multiple orders of magnitude different from the gospel accounts.

>And again, this is just 1 of the 13 gods I've mentioned resurrecting themselves.

So are you saying that you recognize at least for this one that there are legitimate, non-intellectually-dishonest reasons to trust the New Testament over the Vedas, and you want to move on to the other 12 now? This is why from the get-go I was more interested in discussing the fact that different texts are different levels of trustworthiness for a number of different reasons. Could be the details, could be the provenance, could be the intended audience or the interest of those promoting it.

I can give you a dozen books about people going to the moon, from Jules Verne's 1865 From the Earth to the Moon to the fantastic North Korean story of Kim Jong Il's heroic conquest of the moon as told by the North Korean propaganda ministry, to the Bernstain Bears on the Moon, to Michael Chaikin's A Man on the Moon: Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. Are Kim's and Chaikin's going to be equally credible because they both describe physical possibilities? Is Chaikin's story unbelievable just because Verne's, Kim's, and Bernstain's are incredible for various reasons? Should we discount Chaikin because of this book that says it was a hoax? Or should we believe it just because it's possible?

Edit: fixed a link

> To make money and because why not?

You could claim that universities cover a lot of subjects "to make money." The point is that theology is an academic field, contrary to what you wrote previously.

> I read a ton of philosophy textbooks

Could you give an example? It would be easier to compare on a concrete basis.

> > he doesn't really believe it's a useful discipline except insofar as it supports science

> Because it's true.

I guess you don't in fact read a lot of philosophy, then, otherwise you'd see the problem with this.

> He's as much a philosopher as...

By that definition, we're all philosophers. Which is fine - you're basically defining it as someone who thinks, and writes about what he's thinking. Almost any blogger or redditor qualifies, although some are better at it than others.

> He knows everything there is to know about religion.

If you want to be taken seriously in discussions, don't make wild claims that are clearly false on their face. People will have a tendency to dismiss what you're saying, with good reason.

> Sam Harris as well. He's got a degree in philosophy

Well, he has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, so you can head on over to /r/philosophy and find plenty of people who have more formal philosophical education than he does. Someone with a bachelor's has not made an acknowledged original contribution to the field. It's doubtful that his work in books like "The Moral Landscape" would qualify as such, since like Dawkins' book, it doesn't really contain original material - it offers a standard consequentialist position with some handwaving about maybe one day being able to scientifically determine morals by measuring well-being. It doesn't engage the extensive existing philosophical literature about morality, and doesn't resolve new issues.

> So 2 philosophers supporting Dawkins is plenty for me. 2 people have put their reputations on the line.

Hardly, since Harris doesn't have an academic reputation, he's purely a pop author.

In any case, it's not that Dawkins' book is wrong, it's just that it's neither original philosophy, nor advanced philosophy, and as such, it doesn't demonstrate any philosophical prowess. That in itself is not a criticism of the book, or of Dawkins - the book provides excellent introductory coverage of a broad range of issues which, to someone not yet familiar with them, can be very useful. Dawkins would probably agree that that was its purpose! But if you consider it philosophically advanced or sophisticated, all it means as that you haven't been exposed to much philosophy.

As a concrete example of a book that provides a much more in-depth philosophical treatment of the subject, see Mackie's The Miracle of Theism. Don't be put off by the name, it's a strong critique of theism. Read the reviews at that link to get some idea of what the book contains.

In the last 500 years, conflicts in Europe have been slowly decreasing, until the last 50 years or so when it rapidly became much smaller than in any of the previous centuries. This has corresponded with a slow but sure improvement in living conditions. Some countries in Europe haven't seen a war in over 200 years (Sweden hasn't participated in a war directly in 250 years). These are the most developed nations on Earth.

If you've read Jared Diamon's Collapse, you'll know that many civilizations have vanished from the Earth due to over-consuming what their environments could provide. Japan is an example of a country that managed, centuries ago, to avoid self-destruction though managing the few resources it had. I have, therefore, seen evidence that peace and environment awareness seem to be the hallmark of progress in the very long term, not war as it is erroneously believed, and that failure to remain peaceful or manage the environment well can cause the "collapse" of a civilization, no matter how advanced.

So, yes, it's logical that civilizations that manage to develop for many millenia without killing itself and its environment must have learned how to achieve progress peacefully and taking good care of its environment.

>Yeah but there's also the rest of the paragraph, anarchists agree that monopolies on force will exist, we just want to democratically control them.

That is not true. If anarchists believed in a democratically controlled monopoly of force, they would be "Democrats", not "anarchists". Hell, in much of the world today we do have a monopoly of force which is technically "democratically controlled" by the generally accepted definition of "democracy", so by this conception of what anarchists think we might as well say we already have anarchy which is obviously a ludicrous conclusion. Anarchists do often use the language of "direct democracy" (erroneously, in my view) because this concept is often associated to people having control over their own lives and getting together to discuss stuff that is important to them, but any way anarchists do still oppose any sort of "democracy" ("direct" or otherwise) as a system of government insofar as it is a system of government and are more likely to write general critiques of democracy^[1] than to try and make the monopoly on force "democratic".

Social order does not require a monopoly on force, the establishment of fixed rules or the existence of particular parties with the political authority to enforce them. We know this because we actually know of societies that have existed with out any political authority or social hierarchy (Graeber^[2] for example cites the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo...) and the Yale professor of anthropology James C. Scott even wrote a book^[3] about stateless peoples from the region of Zomia who have - for millenia - consciously resisted integration into State based civilization because they actually prefer anarchy (largely because life in the neighbouring State societies was characterized by "slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare").

The real question for most anarchists today is how can these same basic social forces that are at play in those anarchic societies scale and adapt to an post-industrial, large scale society. The general idea is to make those social forces take the form of inter-locking networks of self-managed associations (with no monopoly on force or central bureaucracy), oriented around the social ownership of the means of production and a organized gift or mutualistic economy. There have been all sorts of experiments with particular anarchist principles and practices (experiments in worker's self-management, experiments in gift economies such as Linux, real communities like Freetown Christiania, etc) and even mass revolutions which saw these experiments applied in a larger context (Paris Commune, Shinmin, Catalonia, etc), and while so far no lasting anarchist mass society has come into being (mostly due to the quick repression that follows and the lack of international support to defend itself from it) this does not mean anarchy cannot work.

Our fellow anarchist /u/humanispherian has for a long time openly criticized^[4] (and i agree with him) the curious phenomenon of anarchists who are "much more comfortable with the language of governmentalism and authority than they are with the concept of anarchy" and this curious phenomenon is certainly very prevalent on the Reddit anarchist milieu, but i don't think i have ever seen anyone go as far as state that "anarchists agree that monopolies on force will exist, we just want to democratically control them."

Lot of people in this thread giving some very bad or lazy responses. My undergraduate philosophy thesis was on Plantinga's freewill theodicy but my courses covered the breadth of religious philosophy and so I've actually had to read and discuss this book before.

I don't know how to do the symbols on my keyboard so apologies in advance but if you are looking for a book that provides an insanely comprehensive refutation of "modern-logic" formalized versions of the ontological argument, you want Jordan Howard Sobel's "Logic and Theism", which goes into great detail with the formal logic notation.

Sobel's explanation of why modal axiom S5 is superficially correct but entirely redundant and not applicable to this problem is as good as Mackie's but stated with needless complexity so for that you should read J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism for the goodies there. Mackie and Sobel both think that Plantinga crudely overextrapolates <>[]X-->[]X from <>X->[]<>X. Mackie does it better than I do.

The long and short of it is that Plantinga's argument, while more sophisticated than Anselm's in its formalization, is really not that much more sophisticated in its premises. Sobel hammers on the point that there is a crucial amphiboly on "maximally excellent in possible world X" between "maximally excellent [given the conditions of] possible world X" and "maximally excellent [and also existing in] possible world X" more than he needs to in an otherwise very efficient textbook. His more interesting counterclaim attacks another amphiboly in the inference from "<>[]X(^01&02) in W" to "[]X(^01&02) where X^01 & 02 can stand for whatever property he's looking to establish. He shows through the formulation that there is a "floating," unresolved <> in the argument that actually reduces the entire ontological argument to "<>x" where x is the entire ontological argument.

I won't be in front of the book for a few hours but if you like you can message me and I can try to scan or take pictures of the pages from his book, it's a little expensive to buy just to beat your friend in an argument, but I've never seen it refuted in print.

One of the most-discussed current theories of American politics is "The Party Decides," which basically argues that party members (Governors, Senators, Representatives, as well as party leaders at state and local levels) play a much larger role in selecting their party's Presidential nominee than most people realize. Many primary voters end up following endorsements and other signals from these leaders about what candidate is best for the party. This is why, despite the Tea Party and other right-wing movements that have been around for at least a decade, moderate 'establishment' candidates like John McCain and Mitt Romney have actually won the nomination.

Based on that theory, it is very likely that the 2016 Republican nominee will be someone with experience in political office whose views fall within the mainstream of the party. That excludes Trump and Carson. It also strongly suggests that the nominee will be someone that most of the party members like and get along with, which excludes Cruz. Rubio at this point seems to be the candidate with the most support who has government experience and mainstream party views. The fact that the GOP isn't lining up behind him yet is most likely because they don't like or trust him. My prediction is that they'll come around to him when it becomes clear that the other establishment candidates (Bush, Christie, Kasich) are not going to pick up enough support to win.

Edit: Jonathan Chait examines a few theories about why the GOP establishment hasn't coalesced behind Rubio yet.

I second the reading idea! Ask your history or science teachers for suggestions of accessible books. I'm going to list some that I found interesting or want to read, and add more as I think of them.

A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Title explains it all. It is very beginner friendly, and has some very entertaining stories. Bryson is very heavy on the history and it's rather long but you should definitely make every effort to finish it.

Lies my teacher told me

The greatest stories never told (This is a whole series, there are books on Presidents, science, and war as well).

There's a series by Edward Rutherfurd that tells history stories that are loosely based on fact. There are books on London and ancient England, Ireland, Russia, and one on New York

I read this book a while ago and loved it- Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk It's about a monk who was imprisoned for 30 years by the Chinese.

The Grapes of Wrath.

Les Misérables. I linked to the unabridged one on purpose. It's SO WORTH IT. One of my favorite books of all time, and there's a lot of French history in it. It's also the first book that made me bawl at the end.

You'll also want the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Federalist Papers.

I'm not sure what you have covered in history, but you'll definitely want to find stuff on all the major wars, slavery, the Bubonic Plague, the French Revolution, & ancient Greek and Roman history.

As for science, find these two if you have any interest in how the brain works (and they're pretty approachable).
Phantoms in the brain
The man who mistook his wife for a hat

Alex and Me The story of a scientist and the incredibly intelligent parrot she studied.

For a background in evolution, you could go with The ancestor's tale

A biography of Marie Curie

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is a quick and easy read, and very heavy on the adventure. You'll also want to read his other book The Hot Zone about Ebola. Absolutely fascinating, I couldn't put this one down.

The Devil's Teeth About sharks and the scientists who study them. What's not to like?

>Should your wages go up three time because of nothing you did? Why?

I'll let Richard Wolff, a Phd economics professor elaborate why, and maybe... just maybe... you'll see the big underlying picture he's trying to convery. So pucker up that sphincter hole my friend:

From 1820 to 1970 the following sentence is true: The average level of wages ─ real wages what you actually got for an hours worth of work rose every decade for 150 years. There's' probably no capitalist country that can boast a record like that. It's absolutely stunning and unusual. even in the great depression, real wages went up because even though peoples money wages went down prices fell even more, so you ended up being able to buy more even though you had more dollars in your pocket, because prices fell.

What did this mean? It meant that Americans began to believe, and you know that how deeply that is in our political language, that we lived in a really blessed place. God, if you believe in that, must really like us, something magical about America: You came here, you worked hard, and amazingly, you got more. You could imagine to live in your own home. You could even dream at one point of sending your children to college. To have a car all your own. To wear nice clothes. It was amazing every family thought that it would live better than the generation before in the next generation better still. Parents got into the habit of offering their children to provide them with the education and the support that would make them have a better life.

And the irony here the United States and the marvel was that it was true... millions of people, the ancestors the most of us in this room if we're Americans came to the United states hoping to cash in on this operation, willing to work hard expecting that their life here would reward them with a higher standard of living then they would have gotten if they'd stayed where they came from, and mostly they were right. And it becomes part of the American culture in the American imagination. This is the place where if you work hard you get more pay. Yea... the work may not be pleasant. The work may be difficult, but the reward is at the mall. You'll earn more money and you'll buy more stuff.

Try to imagine with me what it would mean to a population that for a hundred and fifty years internalizes that image, that hope, that expectation if it were suddenly to stop being true. And I ask you to imagine that because that's what happened.

In the 1970's the rising real wage the United States came to an and, it has never resumed. The real wage of the American worker today, the average amount of goods and services you can buy with an hour of your labor is no greater today than it was in the 1978. You may be working harder. You may be working longer You may be working more efficiently because you work with a computer and all these other things. And indeed you are: You are delivering more goods and service per hour of your work to your employer. He's very happy about, but he doesn't pay you one iota more. This is an astonishing change, a sea change, a dramatic alteration in one's circumstance. It's all the more power in our country because it's unspoken. Because in the 1970's or 80's and 90's or to this day, nobody talks about this. Nobody confronts this. No one asks, "why did this happen?" "What do we do about it?" Instead as good Americans, we pretend that it isn't there. We imagine that if it's going on it's just about me and my job and my circumstance rather than a social process. And we imagine that it's not a social problem just my particular problem then I can solve it.

How did the American working class solve the problem. Two things they did, starting in the 1970's and right up until the crisis, and those two things are part of why this crisis happens which is why I'm gonna tell you about them now. The first thing Americans did is conclude,

>"Okay, I'm not getting anymore wages per hour, I know what, I'll do more hours."

Smart move.

>"And not only me the adult male in the house... but my wife. She's gonna go out, she may have been at home, she may have been a housewife... no more of that. She has to go out because we have to sustain the the family standard of living rising. And the old people have to come out of retirement and take at least a part-time job. And the teenager ought to do something on Saturday's at least, don't you think?

Here's a statistic to think about: the average number of hours worked per year by an American right now average, is 20% more than the average number of hours worked by a Swedish, French, German, or Italian worker. Think about it. For every 6 hours you work, they only work 5 or something like that. Some of you go to Europe and you enjoy lovely dinners with wine in an alfresco setting in an Italian town, and you say to yourself, "These people know how to live." And you imagine it's a matter of their culture they just love grapes. It isn't got much to do with culture:

What they have is... TIME.

They don't work like we do. They have time for long dinners. We are the country that invented fast food, and now you know why. It's a necessity, we don't have time to sit down. We need jobs to run by one of those takeout windows and yell something out at a disconsolate teenager who yells something back and hands you something you shouldn't put in your body in any case. And so Americans went to work most importantly the women. In 1970, 40% of American women worked outside the home for money. Today, double 80%. An absolutely fundamental change: those women had to do that. They merely thought of it as women's liberation and it certainly had those dimensions. They wanted to help the family, the point in fact is if the family was going to continue to consume to give its children what it had promised to live the American dream., since husband wasn't gonna get anymore wages ever again. She had to go out. But when the wife goes out all kinds of things change: Women in America, household women held together the emotional life of our society. They did the emotional work. They provided the solace. When that woman has to go out and do 8 hours of work and get dressed and do the travel and back home, she can't do it anymore. She may face that fact, but she can't.

Starting in the 1970's, the United States became the country with the highest rate of divorce, the relationships couldn't survive. We have 6% of the population in the world and consume over half the psychotropic drugs, the anti-depressants, what's going on? Are we crazy people? I don't think so. I think we are under extraordinary pressure. We work the longest hours on the face of the earth. We do more hours per average worker than the Japanese. That's saying something. And our families are stressed, deeply stressed, as anyone who has studied the situation knows. Our behavior has changed under the pressure of this extra work, and one way to describe it to you is to mention a book some of you may know. A Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, wrote a famous book with a funny title, Bowling Alone, he studies Americans participation in anything other than making their life hang together.

• Bowling leagues used to absorb millions of Americans. No more.

• Trade unions used to be centers of collective life. No more.

• Community organizations used to get lots of people. PTA's did too. No more.

Americans turned inwards in the last 30 years, and it's not some mysterious cultural phenomenon. It has to do with you're working too hard, you're stressed out of your mind. Your relationships are falling apart. Your intimate life is a disaster. But you don't want to see it in terms of wages and the job, and that's what I'm gonna stress.

So the American people ever resourceful did something else which further traumatized them. To keep the consumption going to deliver the American dream to their children, they went on a borrowing binge the likes of which no working class in the history of the world ever undertook before. Starting in the 1970's the Americans savings rate collapsed. We stopped saving money, but much worse than that, we BORROWED money. We invented a new way to give everybody debts. It's called the credit card. Before the 1970's they didn't have that. only the rich people had an American Express card. After that we developed the American Express card for the masses, it's called Master and Visa, and you all have them, you have lots of them. You collect them. You max one out, you get another one. And you keep hoping that this Russian Roulette will not get you. And so in 2007 we came to the end of the line for the working class. They couldn't work anymore hours, they were exhaust, they were stressed beyond words. and now they were overwhelmed by having violated what their parents have told them, "Save money little boy." "Hold something back little girl for a difficult time. For a rainy day. For a special expense. For an illness." Not only did we not save anything, but we're in a hock up to our ears.

So, with Pirates, I would start with a good introductory book like:

Under the Black Flag. It's a good general overview book that allows you to separate some of the myths from the reality of pirates. It's a good easy read and very factual. A great beach holiday book.

After that, I would suggest moving up a step to:

The Republic of Pirates, which is a fantastic book that reads like an adventure novel about the late "Golden Age" of pirates, including Blackbeard. This book is fun, full of facts, and reads like a modern reporter for Slate, Salon, or Rolling Stone would tell it (because it is written by a reporter).

Then finally, to get into the nuts a bolts, the why and how of Pirates I recommend anything by Benerson Little. He conducted an AMA earlier this year and blew it out of the water.

For his books The Searovers Practice is bar none one of the finest books I've read. Buccaneers Realm is great when talking about the very specific group of pirates known as Buccaneers.

Classical liberalism isn't the only ism concerned with evidence and reasoning, but since it's apparently one of the reference points you happen to be familiar with you're just assuming that must be what I mean. Instead, I'm talking about the kind of modern liberalism described books such as Fear Itself by Ira Katznelson. You seem to be talking about the caricature of modern liberalism typically advanced by the likes of Jonah Goldberg which tends to be laughed out of the room by serious historians.

Modern liberalism is what we got with Roosevelt's reimagining of the role and purpose of government in managing civil society as he dealt with the after effects of the Great Depression and a World War, and the post Roosevelt task of establishing the post-world War II order. In Roosevelt's time liberal democracies were in competition with ascendant autocratic and authoritarian regimes around the world, and there was very much a sentiment among public intellectuals that democracy might not be able to compete with these other forms of governance. This liberalism uses institutions to effectively deal with large-scale demographic and economic trends, effectively support integrate technology into the modern world, and carefully manage international norms.

All of which requires careful, nuanced engagement with empirical realities and academic research, and requires fostering an environment respectful of the rule of law. And you can see expressions of this liberalism in the post-world War II order we helped establish in democracies in Western Europe, often cited as ideals by liberals that we should move toward. In short, it's a bit more nuanced than regulation loving terrorist sympathizers.

Meanwhile, during the same time conservative Democrats in the South were happy to make common cause with Roosevelt because New Deal programs meant the transfer of resources from wealthy Northeastern states to the South, which is fine with them so long as it could be executed in a way that didn't interfere with the prevailing racial order, which is why states rights was such a point of emphasis. Any federal administration of programs brought with it the possibility of sharing economic opportunities not just with poor white people but also poor black people. Once it became clear that the Democratic party was aligning itself with the civil rights movement, conservatives rebelled and embraced the Republican Party and gradually rolled back the New Deal and crushed the labor movement, allowing a constantly evolving structure of business and industry groups to become the animating forces of politics, especially on the Republican side.

The various forces of racial identity politics and business interests consolidated over a gradual process that spanned decades and culminated in the election of Reagan and the emergence of anti-intellectualism. The business-friendly nature of the party has made conservatives disdainful of research showing the hazards of smoking, and later dismissive of empirical research about the dangers of climate change or the truth of evolution.

And conservative leaders whipped up the passions of their base by stirring up animosity toward immigrants, foreigners, poor people who aren't white (eg welfare queens), and playing up fears for political advantage during the Cold War and War on Terror. The obsession with security, fear of some sort of apocalypse or world war or terrorist attack always on the verge of happening has indicated a desire for strong leaders, a strong sense of tribal patriotism, and a worship of strength and especially military leaders. Or authoritarian tough guy leaders in general such as Trump.

In a superficial sense it's true that anyone of any ideology could hypothetically be sympathetic toward authoritarianism. But it also ignores the facts on the ground about the dominant political passions that animate the two ideologies in the United States at the moment, which clearly indicate a strong desire for authoritarianism on the side of conservatives which simply isn't matched even remotely on the liberal side.

Further reading:

• Fear Itself
  
• Anything by John Dean on Authoritarianism
  
• The Republican Brain
  
• Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
  
  

I've been saying from the beginning that the process, that the party insiders have the opportunity to ultimately control who gets the nomination, is wholly undemocratic. I'm not using it now as an convenient excuse to explain Bernie's loss.

If you want to increase voter turnout, you have to instill some confidence in the American people that their vote actually counts and that they have a say in the outcome.

In the last general election, 25% of the people who didn't vote had said they did not vote because they felt that their vote would not matter. A majority of Democrats said that the 2016 primaries had not been a good way of determining the best-qualified nominees.

If you want the voters to be more enthusiastic when they vote and that you want them to vote Democratic, we need to ensure that the entire election process is more democratic. Primaries included.

ETA:

In March 2016, WaPo wrote that superdelegates have strong incentive to follow public input. But that didn't happen. In several states you would see that some superdelegates would refuse to be bound with their constituents despite the fact Bernie had won a large majority for that state primary or caucus.



State | Result | Margin | HRC supers | Bernie supers | Total supers
---|---|----|----|----|----
Vermont | 86%-14% | 72% | 5 | 5| 10
Alaska | 80%-20% | 60% | 1 | 1 | 4
Washington | 73%-27% | 46% | 11 | 0 | 17
Hawaii | 70%-30% | 40% | 5 | 2 | 9
Democrats Abroad | 69%-31% | 38% | 2.5 | 0.5 | 3
Kansas | 68%-32% | 36% | 4 | 0 | 4
Maine | 64%-36% | 28% | 4 | 1 | 5
Minnesota | 62%-38% | 24% | 12 | 2 | 16
New Hampshire | 60%-38% | 22% | 6 | 1 | 8
Colorado | 59%-41% | 18% | 9 | 0 | 12
Wisconsin | 57%-43% | 14% | 9 | 1 | 10
Wyoming | 56%-44% | 12% | 4 | 0 | 4

Additional reading - The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform

> Throughout the contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, politicians and voters alike worried that the outcome might depend on the preferences of unelected superdelegates. This concern threw into relief the prevailing notion that—such unusually competitive cases notwithstanding—people, rather than parties, should and do control presidential nominations. But for the past several decades, The Party Decides shows, unelected insiders in both major parties have effectively selected candidates long before citizens reached the ballot box.

Well, what you're discussing here I make a living out of studying (theoretical political science). Just about all technology so far has been good technology, and anything in the not-too-distant future is going to be good technology, and anything in the way-distant future will probably be good technology.

The problem is not with technology, but the dissonance-gap created between the technology we develop, and our behavioral implementation of these technologies into society. Medicine was a good technology, and we've basically implemented it well (some states don't get common medicines, but overall we've been good with Medicine). Radio was a good technology and we've developed it well. Flight is a good technology and we've developed it well. The internet and miniaturized media devices? well, that's a complex one. Obviously it's a defining good of our age, and we could go on all day discussing how good it is for our society in various aspects. But, it's also bad in many -- again, not bad in itself, but in how we as a society have chosen to implement the technology of mobile media and the internet.


This will probably be my dissertation, so suffice it to say these technologies have driven us towards a more democratic political atmosphere (that's little-d democratic as in non-representative, not the party). Referendums, Senate election reform, 24hr. news cycles, daily polls, all serve to pressure elected officials as the democratic citizens pressure them for more instant results. The result is, effectively, an antagonist environment of partisanship, bickering, no-compromise, and misinformation. The evolution of immediacy-technologies (this includes flight, I suppose) has changed the pace of our world beyond what is responsible for most of us. To put it simply, what we have developed in terms of social-accessibility this past century is slightly beyond what we as a people are capable of working with maturely. Infotainment butchers credible news channels, misinformation and bias runs amok, fringe party movements dominate national election, the few qu'ran burning crazies grab headlines. This trend is not a result of human evolution, but a lack of. Our technology has improved and we haven't.

This goes beyond civics though, ironically we can socially flounder because of social media technologies. Just look at all the forever-alones on reddit/the internet, or when you go out with your friends for a drink and they all tap away on their smart phones texting other people instead of enjoying the real moment with eachother. Robert Putnam basically made this his focus of study which can be summed up politically here and more socially analyzed in his book Bowling Alone.

Fortunately, we've grown accordingly with technology where it really matters - international conflict and the nuclear bomb. We haven't had any nuclear winters because we were able to adapt to the new international atmosphere of Mutually Assured Destruction - we were smart enough to put aside our antagonistic nature towards our perceived enemies, and cooled our heads well enough to prevent a nuclear war for 60 years (and still into today!). There have been no major world-wars since we've developed mass-mobilization capabilities, and no crazy biological warfare (of course there are incidents like Hussein and his Kurds, or WW1 gas weapons, but those are regional events or in the case of WW1 an example of us toying with a new technology before truly understanding it)



So, thus far there's no real evidence that we've hit a breaking point where we've gone too far in terms of technological development. But we're getting pretty close. Historically there have been moments of technological development, and moments of social development. During the renaissance we began developing philosophy, human rights, and justice while simultaneously making huge strides in technology (industrial revolution anyone)? Maybe one sparked the other, maybe one allowed for the other, either way we and our technology grew together. I only hope that if we wish to continue our exponential push to singularity, we're able to kick our behavior/cognitive development along with it.

> I don't think you can have quality emergent complexity (depth) without elegance. Elegance is a byproduct of a strong core mechanism, and without that you really have no chance.

Sorry, but that is just euro-gamer-snobbery. Emergent complexity is very strong in over-designed complex games like many oldschool roguelikes (Nethack etc) or Cataclysm: DDA or Dwarf Fortress. Nothing elegant about the designs, but just throwing in that amount of complexity creates an environment where interesting complex stories emerge all the time.

There is at least one equivalent in boardgames I have experience with: Advanced Squad Leader. Hundreds of pages of rules, but thanks to there being rules for everything and lots of different units moving on different terrain fun things happen all the time.

Of course almost any pen-and-paper role-playing game ever would probably be a good examples of this as well. Even when the rules are (unusually) short, the presence of a human game-master means that complexity is limitless.

This is something that comes up a lot in the book Playing at the World: Games where players can "try anything". Of course only real rpgs can really do that, but some roguelikes, computer-rpgs, and ameritrash-games (and a few wargames like ASL) also comes close. Allowing the player to attempt to do anything that would make sense in a situation, rather than restricting them to some small set of "elegant" rules, is a fantastic way to make interesting things emerge.

Personally, I think the American Empire is declining. Sir John Glubb had a wonderful write up of this, and I have copied his conclusion below. The full PDF can be found here and it is only 27 pages long.

Glubb looked at eleven empires over the course of history. I copied a relevant summary from the end. The pdf is online here.

> As numerous points of interest have arisen in the course of this essay, I close with a brief summary, to refresh the reader’s mind.

> (a) We do not learn from history because our studies are brief and prejudiced.

> (b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national greatness.

> (c) This average has not varied for 3,000 years. Does it represent ten generations?

> (d) The stages of the rise and fall of great
nations seem to be:

> The Age of Pioneers (outburst)

> The Age of Conquests

> The Age of Commerce

> The Age of Affluence

> The Age of Intellect

> The Age of Decadence.

> (e) Decadence is marked by:

> Defensiveness

> Pessimism

> Materialism

> Frivolity

> An influx of foreigners

> The Welfare State

> A weakening of religion.

> (f) Decadence is due to:

> Too long a period of wealth and power

> Selfishness

> Love of money

> The loss of a sense of duty.

> (g) The life histories of great states are amazingly similar, and are due to internal factors.

> (h) Their falls are diverse, because they are largely the result of external causes.

> (i) History should be taught as the history of the human race, though of course with emphasis on the history of the student’s own country.

The real question is how technology will either speed up, slow down. or prevent the same thing from happening to America.

I also recommend the following books:

The Collapse of Complex Societies, By Joseph Tainter

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, By Jared Diamond

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change

Finally, when it comes to survival information, I highly recommend www.survivalblog.com. To me, they are the best of the best.

I also would like to plug Radio Free Redoubt (podcast) as well as AmRRON (American Redoubt Radio Operator's Network).

Ben Thompson explored Facebook's effect on elections two years ago:

> This [engaging content rising to the top] is a big problem for the parties as described in The Party Decides. Remember, in Noel and company’s description party actors care more about their policy preferences than they do voter preferences, but in an aggregated world it is voters aka users who decide which issues get traction and which don’t. And, by extension, the most successful politicians in an aggregated world are not those who serve the party but rather those who tell voters what they most want to hear.

As South China Morning Post points out, if your candidate selection process is hijacked, you only get the illusion of control.

Look at the recent Italian election. The recently formed Five Star Movement gained 31% of the votes earlier this month.

From Bloomberg:

> The five stars in its name represent the five issues it cares most about: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, the right to internet access and environmentalism.

Meanwhile, Americans traffic the conventional wisdom that a vote for the environmentalist or libertarian fringe candidate will have an adverse affect on that voter's preferences. Every American, like me, who was offered Bush vs Kerry AND Clinton vs Trump in their voting lifetime has an obligation to evangelize something like the alternatives offered in /r/endFPTP.

>can you please clarify your ideological position

Sure.

I'm a paleoconservative deep ecologist. This means I adhere to the oldest values of American conservatism and pair them with an interest in environmentalism through a more wholesome design of society.

I moderate /r/new_right because the new right ideas are closest to paleoconservatism in some ways. I tried to write a description of new_right that encompassed all of the ideas that the movement has tossed around.

Beyond that, I think politics is a matter of strategies and not collectivist moral decisions, am fond of libertarian-style free market strategies, and take interest in many things, hence the wide diversity of stuff that I post.

I've learned that on Reddit it's important to ask for people to clarify definitions before ever addressing any question using those terms. If you want me to answer any specific questions, we need a clear definition first agreed on by all parties.

I recommend the following books for anyone interesting in post-1970s conservatism beyond the neoconservative sphere:

• Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue
  
• Pat Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower
  
• Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
  
• Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot
  
• Jared Diamond, Collapse
  
• Mark Steyn, America Alone
  
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
  
• Bruce Charlton, Thought Prison: The Fundamentalist Nature of Political Correctness
  
  Other than that, I'm pretty much a mainstream Republican. Not all links I post constitute endorsement, such as this fascinating article.

No one has called this out yet? Have you read Nate Silver's reasonings behind Sanders having no chance and Trump maybe having some?

Silver and FiveThirtyEight largely believe that the party decides. Which means ENDORSEMENTS are the biggest indicator of which candidate is the most likely to be the nominee, not poll numbers.

Trump has somewhat of a chance because the Republican party is historically divided. His huge poll numbers have a chance of dazzling the public before the Republican party can get behind a candidate, which will force the party to support him or else they face splitting their base if they refuse to endorse him. This is why you have people like Graham and Pataki dropping out in quick succession because they're doing what's best for the party.

There's a lot going on with Republicans that clears a path for Trump to maybe get it. Meanwhile, Clinton is literally the most supported party candidate in the history of elections on planet Earth. Short of a scandal worse than watergate or her death, her support isn't going anywhere. Not to mention, Silver has already wrote about how it's misguided to compare Sanders to Trump.

And just for kicks, since you seem like the type of person who's going to have some misguided optimism in February when Bernie wins Iowa and New Hampshire, FiveThirtyEight already predicted that Sanders would win those two states and then lose everywhere else.

Maybe you should read what the most accurate statistician actually thinks before criticizing him?

Oh hay! I was actually just reading something that was mentioning this intersection of politics and language. I was reading "The Art of Not Being Governed" in a section describing the process of how people or groups would deliberately avoid or remove themselves from the power of the state by a process he calls "dissimilation" (as opposed to assimilation). "State Space" for Scott isn't just that area under political state control, which could be rather small. It would project itself beyond the boundaries under direct control through cultural influence: religious ideas that would emphasize a divine king, social structures that emphasized hierarchical organization, and critically common languages that would allow people to easily communicate, trade, negotiate, or command if enslaved. So various peoples, both expats from the state and outsider peoples who resisted domination, would not just "run to the hills" to put physical distance between themselves and the state but also emphasize, embrace, or in some cases wholly construct separate cultural identities to "dissimilate" themselves from the culture of the state peoples. This would go as far as for a non-state people whose language would be linguistically similar to a state people language to claim ignorance, as though they're not speaking the same language, similar to how African and Indian slaves in the Americas would resist their colonial masters by claiming not to understand instruction.

So in opposite to the Nation-State idea of a shared cultural identity creating a political system, this is a political system creating a shared cultural identity.

Also random related question: I know in America-land, when people want to emphasize the differences between each other (for political or other reasons) we will quite often first emphasize the "weird" way the other talks. Like how resistance to the Bush administration loved to make fun of Texan accent, or rural populists will exaggerate an almost posh-like accent for city-folk. Is that also true for other languages/places?

Great Question. I was thinking about my own history. I wish there was a good single Codex, like handing out Bibles. I'd say read books broadly, read well, listen to debate, study the free MOOC courses online like edx.org. Always have a consciousness above what you are listening/reading that takes the mental exercise to evaluate: what works and what flaws there are in things, even ideas you love. I think books on Science history are especially helpful, like Byson's A Short History of nearly Everything or Boortin's The Discoverers

Words such as "race" are used to draw dividing lines between genetically dissimilar populations. How dissimilar varies over time. Europeans and Africans are clearly of different races, for example. Nor would Europeans and Arabs ever be mistaken. When you compare West Europeans (core Europeans) and Eastern Europeans (Slavs, mostly), the water gets a little murkier. They certainly fall under the "white" umbrella, but how much? For instance, I have a good eye for this, and can tell them apart with ease. The average white person cannot. So is there a grand unified White Race™? Probably not. But there are white races, of which the label "white" can be reasonably applied to all of them.

What seems to have happened to most of the ancient world—through Europe, Asia, the Middle East—is that the Indo-European people(s) swooped down and conquered, established civilizations, and then gradually, over many generations, "melted" into the conquered peoples. The white phenotype was probably as fragile to intermixing then as now, and besides, though most similar to Europeans (or "whites") they were forerunners, "prototypes".

Historical genetic overlap, though important, is not the whole story, as evidenced by convergent evolution, which can form nearly the same structure from totally unlike ancestries; see sharks, which once were fish, and dolphins, which once were deer-like ungulates. Not the same, but remarkably similar in some important ways. Put differently, a group of stone-age Europeans living in Africa would lose their essential European characteristics over time, slowly becoming more and more like Africans.

And the ancient Romans were right: the tribes that inhabited the island of Brittania were incapable of being civilized. They are the ancestors of modern Britons, yes, but not the same. They have changed—genetically; they literally evolved—rather substantially in the past two millennia. Read The 10,000 Year Explosion for a better idea, it's quick and easy.

Re: Iraqi vs Iranian. I can tell them apart, but again, convergent evolution.

Yes. Do you have two thousand years to wait while the harsh European environment civilizes the Semitic tribes currently colonizing it? I don't. (And even then they'll still be largely Semitic in nature and temperament, just see the Ashkenazi jews.)

The Japanese are indeed distinct from all other Asian races. They alone were subject to similar environmental conditions as Europeans over the millennia. The small island of Japan just off the Asian continent is remarkably similar to the small island of Britain just off the European continent.

OMG I get to say it in this thread, and another thread taught me:
https://www.amazon.com/Day-World-Came-Town-Newfoundland/dp/0060559713

This is a WONDERFUL BOOK about the citizens of the town where the airport was... and how they took care of everyone. Someone lent teenage lovers a car to get away from the mess, others brought blankets, entertainment, etc. It's a heartwarming, WONDERFUL tale of love and kindness. I guess we could use that right about now.

Are you sure about that? I'm not very learned yet, but I read one of John McWhorter's books and pretty much the whole thing is him talking about how there are certain grammatical concepts like 'do' that had to come from Celtic languages. After all it's a pretty unique thing and the Celtic languages are the only ones that have something just like it. And in any case, Early Modern English sounds like way too late for it to appear. I think I remember reading that those grammatical trends were incorporated into spoken English pretty much immediately, although they didn't show up in writing until a couple centuries after the Norman Invasion, when people started to actually write in English again.

Instead of talking yourself out of becoming educated, imagine what would happen to society if everyone did so. Everyone, people like you included, has the potential to transform society through education, dialogue, and activism. Judging from some of your comments, I'm gonna go ahead and recommend that you start with Karl Marx. If you're worried about exploitation, interested in socialism, etc., go to the source. Either the Communist Manifesto or Capital, depending on how heavy you're willing to get. If you want something that covers a wide selection of Marx and Engels, I highly recommend this reader. This includes the Manifesto, book 1 of Capital, and some other important essays. Maybe you'll like it. Maybe you'll hate it. But it's a great place to start if you want first hand exposure to the foundation of critical theory. Keep in mind that everyone you talk to, even philosophy majors, even philosophy professors, are going to have a bias in one way or another. You have to pursue the truth yourself and don't let anyone scare you out of getting educated and engaged with improving society. Your silence supports the status quo, so if you're comfortable with things being the way they are, by all means stay at home.

It sounds like you have an Intro Geology book.

For a nice overview of historical geology, I was enraptured by "The Earth: An Intimate History" by Richard Fortey. It starts slow but delves into the major developments and ideas of geology as the author visits many significant locales around the world.

Stephen Jay Gould was a very prolific science-writer across paleontology and evolution.

John McPhee has several excellent books related to geology. I would recommend "Rising from the Plains" and "The Control of Nature."

Mark Welland's book "SAND" is excellent, covering topics of sedimentology and geomorphology.

If you are interested in how society manages geologic issues, I would recommend Geo-Logic, The Control of Nature mentioned before, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, and Cadillac Desert.

These are some of the texts I used in university:

• Nesse's Introduction to Mineralogy
  
• Winter's Principles of Metamorphic and Igneous Petrology
  
• Twiss and Moore's Structural Geology
  
• Bogg's Sedimentology and Stratigraphy
  
• Burbank and Anderson's Tectonic Geomorphology
  
• Davis's Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology
  
• Burbank and Anderson's Tectonic Geomorphology
  
• Fetter's Applied Hydrogeology
  
• White's Geochemistry (pdf online)
  
• Shearer's Seismology
  
• Copeland's Communicating Rocks
  

The presidential primaries started out as optional, non-binding referenda held by the parties to see how candidates selected by party elites would fare in elections. There have been various reforms that made them more binding over the years, but historically they were generally just a way to weed out the unelectable candidates.

The early voting states vote early due to historical accident more than anything else, but now there are interests vested in keeping them early. Iowa set their caucus date early when the Democrats made major primary reforms in 1968 and they've been there since. As the primaries have become more important, the influence of going first has grown and Iowa and NH have worked to make sure they keep voting early by moving their dates up whenever someone tries to leapfrog them.

I'd recommend reading The Party Decides if you're interested in the primaries. The analysis doesn't include 2016, there might be something more recent that takes it into account, but I'd recommend it anyway.

I'm drawn to the spirit of libertarians, feel like their hearts are in the right place (sans the neoreactionary bigoted elements that often infiltrate). Paleo is becoming very popular with that crowd, most resistance being from people that either haven't heard about it or people who tend towards naive scientism/technophilia and are hostile to anything outside of the mainstream when it comes to science. I've integrated paleo into my own beliefs (radical decentralist with sympathies that could be called libertarian, anarchist, pro-market, anti-capitalist, and primitivist). A few points:

I want my people to be healthy, strong, fertile, happy, and beautiful. Paleo does that. Paleo is power.

Some anthropological literature examines the reciprocal ecological relationship between states and grains. Grains are state fuel for a variety of reasons, states encourage their cultivation quite literally at gunpoint in one example. Growing root crops like cassava and sweet potatoes on the other hand, is a genuine insurrectionist act. "Escape crops", the author called them.

We see the government's subsidies of HFCS, bogus dietary recommendations, SWAT raids on farm to table dinner gatherings and food co-ops, and all the other ways government policy taints our food as some unique modern aberration, but it's what governments have always done. Control food to control people. Paleo will be appearing on a leaked flyer from some police agency or think tank listing signs of extremism any day now.

Diet is culture. Being different for the sake of being different helps minority groups maintain their cultural/ethnic/religious identity. You see it in slurs against them, e.g. cat-eaters, "beaners". You've seen it with the way your friends and family react to your diet. After eating paleo for a few years, there are fundamental differences in your metabolism, the way you smell, the very chemical composition of your flesh. It makes you the other, and that's desirable when you'd like to set yourself apart culturally.

Allowing my imagination to go further... I see a holistic force of decay, control, and permanent death as the driving impulse behind most of our technology since the beginning of the industrial revolution at least. It's glyphosate in your Fruit Loops, fluoride in your water, the endocrine-disrupting plastic incense inside its Wal-Mart temples. Maybe it's just a useful metaphor that ties a number of things I don't like together. Maybe I really believe it is a force that affects our world materially. Most importantly here, Paleo is a rite of purification that removes the taint from our minds and bodies.

So I would second Integrald's list as great, and I think everyone should read all of the books in the Core section. If you're interested in political economy, I'd specifically point out these from it as nice general-interest introductions:

• Guns Germs and Steel
  
• Why Nations Fail
  
• The Mystery of Capital
  
  If you're interested in alternative models, there are two particular works that I'd recommend reading. The first is probably obvious - get yourself the big old Marx reader. Marxist thought is less important than it used to be, but still worth getting acquainted with.
  
  The second might be less familiar but I think is also very important - Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. It is basically a sociologically-oriented history of the rise of capitalism. Polanyi's argument is that the "free market" is no less a utopian vision than the communist one, and that in many times and places people seek protection from the market rather than a desire to participate in it. This is one of the very few books I've read as an adult that actually changed my perspective in a meaningful way, and if you're interested in the "big questions" of politics and economics I can't recommend it highly enough.

Other posters have touched on the heart of it, but here is a little elaboration if you want to know more:

The only recorded instance of pirates burying treasure anywhere is when Captain William Kidd buried a portion of his ship's cargo on Long Island before meeting with Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont and Governor of New York. It bears mentioning that he didn't bury this treasure specifically to dig it up later, but because he was facing charges of murder and piracy and his goods were likely to be seized.

He buried the treasure to use as a bargaining chip with Bellomont, hoping it would give him leverage and help him avoid going to trial (Bellomont was one of his benefactors and had even financed a previous voyage). This tactic failed completely, and Kidd's treasure was simply dug up. There are rumors that portions of it remain buried, but this is almost certainly nonsense.

I'd also like to point out that Kidd, in terms of what we usually refer to as 'pirates', hardly qualifies at all. He was well known and respected among the colonial nobility, went to sea with the funds and blessings of many high-ranking people, and happened to end up on the wrong end of a political scandal and with his hand in the cookie jar, so to speak. His trial was rushed, and he may have even had a legitimate letter of marque, making him a privateer, not a pirate.

Robert Louis Stevenson used Kidd (or rather, the fictionalized Kidd-as-pirate that had persisted to the late 19th century) as a prototype for Long John Silver, and embellished the part about burying his treasure. Treasure Island is really the root of so many of the pirate icons we know and love (peg legs, parrots, buried treasure, etc.).

If you're interested in learning more, I recommend you take a look at Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates, The Pirate Hunter, and Under the Black Flag.

Edit: It's actually Gardiner's Island, as one of the above posters mentioned, which is near Long Island, but is separate.

The principle of Fürherprinzip is mostly organic. Humans naturally look towards strong leaders. And while the Third Reich was not completely organic, it was a substantial improvement over the liberal Judeo-Capitalist Weimar Republic. Adolf Hitler's long-term plans for Germany would have fully brought about the National Socialist ideal.

\>Have you had many bad experiences with people outside of your cultural background?

Yes, I went to a high school full of Negroes and mestizos, but that's purely anecdotal evidence, no? I'm intellectually honest, so I'll give you something more substantial. It's a study by Dr. Robert Putnam, entitled Bowling Alone. In it, he initially set out to prove the axiom that "diversity is our greatest strength", but quickly discovered quite the opposite. While studying the great cities of America, he found that ethnic diversity is strongly correlated with loss of social cohesion, diminishment of social capital, and a decrease in overall community engagement, not just between ethnic groups, but within them.

This is the book. I can't find a free PDF anywhere, but I have no doubt that you'll be able to find a torrent of it somewhere.

This last point addressed your other queries, too. The reason society must be organized along racial and ethnic lines, without getting into the spiritual side of things, is that human nature ensures that that's the only kind of organization that WILL work.

> Chinese textbook claim Tibet is always part of China, this is not correct. India textbook claim China has nothing to do with Tibet until 1950 invasion, that is not correct either.
>

This is incredibly basic understanding of academia. This is literally entry-level thought. Even at Wikipedia they've always disallowed sources based on criteria just like this. This is not something you should be trumpeting as giving your opinion authority, this is something you should assume everybody already knows.

Because they do.

> do yourself a favor to borrow a book called great game. https://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Struggle-Central-Kodansha/dp/1568360223 At least learn some history of Tibet first.

I appreciate the offer, but I am already pretty well versed in this topic. Apart from anything else, your reccomendation lacks accuracy - the Great Game was between the British and Russian Empires, with Central Asia merely the staging ground. Moreso, that staging ground focused on the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan and the push to India, not the Himalayas. Tibet would be a passing reference in such a text.

Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.

http://www.amazon.com/Season-Witch-Enchantment-Terror-Deliverance-ebook/dp/B005C6FDFY/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Cool, Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal insight, deeply researched history, in-depth reporting, and lyrical prose to create an unparalleled portrait of San Francisco. Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site or intersection in the city, from the mighty Golden Gate Bridge to the raunchy Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End.

http://www.amazon.com/Cool-Gray-City-Love-Francisco-ebook/dp/B00D78R550/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1451757678&sr=1-1&keywords=cool+grey+city+of+love

Not a book, but this American Experiance episode is fantastic.

In 1957, decades before Steve Jobs dreamed up Apple or Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, a group of eight brilliant young men defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company in order to start their own transistor business. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman who would co-invent the microchip -- an essential component of nearly all modern electronics today, including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones and household appliances.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/

Also, not related to San Francisco directly, but focusing on California and the west, if you want to understand why California is the way it is today, this is on the list of essential reading material.

http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

How? With what money? With what resources? With what education? You're talking about an entire population that was intentionally deprived of familial connections, cultural connections, the ability to organize, the ability to build wealth, the ability to exercise any autonomy, literacy, and education.

Africa is not exactly a small place, and most ex-slaves didn't even know where their ancestors had been kidnapped from.

Also keep in mind how much different things looked at the end of the Civil War than much later. Ex-slaves were promised equality with whites, full rights as citizens of the US, and given the promise of reparations for slavery. Congress passed a law in 1865 that guaranteed full citizenship regardless of race and the 14th amendment was circulated starting in 1866 and became part of the constitution in 1868. For a decade following the end of the Civil War Reconstruction proceeded at a fast pace. Laws were changed, progress was made, historical iniquities were being redressed. The vast majority of ex-slaves in this situation who were offered the possibility of staying wherever they were and using the labor skills they already had to attempt to make a living in America (either through sharecropping or on their own) seemed enormously enticing.

At a minimum the situation looked to be superior to their previous situation of enslavement. They were ostensibly free. They could keep their families together, they could build their lives up (in terms of wealth, community, education, skills, ambition, etc.), and they had the prospect of attaining true equality of stature and accomplishment with whites in perhaps a generation or so.

It was not until two or three decades later when Reconstruction had been destroyed and dismantled, when slavery had been replaced with a racial caste system that was becoming enshrined in custom and law (Jim Crow et al), and when it became abundantly clear that the end of slavery did not mean the end of white supremacy in America that black Americans began to comprehend that the society they lived in was going to limit the extent of their advancements to a very narrowly defined box not much expanded from where it had been before. And then there really was a huge debate on what to do. Black communities felt the oppression, understood the long-term implications and generally understood that the status quo was untenable.

Eventually they did take action and move, out of the South and into the North and the West in one of the most significant demographic shifts in the 20th century called The Great Migration. By then they had more money, more resources, more education, much greater literacy, and greater ability to move around (due to the advent of automobiles and the advancement of railroads). But even so, and even moving within the US alone, it was an enormously challenging endeavor that not all African-Americans undertook.

If you want to get some additional perspective on what things were like I'd suggest reading "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson.

Classism definitely exists, but like everything else doesn't exist in a bubble. Class, race, gender, sex, age...these things all intersect and interact in ways that make social realities for people. Academics (which I am not) have different opinions about the extent to which one is more important than another. I would say yes, historically it has been far more difficult for a person of color to move up in American society and yes, that is still the case today. But I'm just a guy on reddit who likes to read. If you're interested in this stuff here's where I started: The Color of Law, New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the autobiography of Malcolm X, The Warmth of Other Suns

Not the Middle East exactly, but if you want a GREAT perspective on the Middle East and Central Asia you MUST read, The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk.

This an excellent long view of history for those areas. You will not be disappointed.

If you really want to understand RPG culture, I can recommend nothing better than Jon Peterson's brilliantly researched Playing at the World.

This book take you on a historical journey through the history and tropes of table-top gaming, with a focus on the early history of D&D. The quality of the research is breathtaking and I learned a great deal about the amazingly innovative gaming groups that gave rise to modern tabletop RPGs.

Essentially, D&D was the byproduct of two mutually compatible lines of gaming experimentation:

First, wargamers who began playing at smaller and smaller scale. (Gary Gygax and his Chainmail miniatures rules)

And secondly, a type of proto-roleplaying game played by some of the groups in the Upper Midwest where people took on the roles of medieval villagers. (Notably in the early Braunstein-style games and Dave Arneson's Blackmoor.)

These two forces collided with one another and the rest, as they say, is history. Gygax brought the serious-minded combat rules, and Arneson brought the ideas of "leveling up," and the entire idea of "Dungeons," which were originally the literal dungeons beneath the castle in his world, as well as much of the early fantasy tropes and roleplaying elements.

That's just the tl;dr though, and I highly recommend reading Peterson's work if you want to really grok the early tabletop gaming scene.

This is a great question that I have thought about a million times. I have actually spent a lot of time trying to find a book on it, but I have not come across one that is specifically about Sociology or Psychology.

I first started to think about this when I was getting my masters degree (in Sociology). Often times I was super excited to share the things I would learn with my family and friends, and how the things I was (and still am) learning are often in contradiction to the things I was told/learned growing up. For context, I'm a white girl who grew up in an upper-middle class politically conservative suburb in a large city with successful parents, and I was always given everything I wanted/needed. I considered myself a Christian and I told people that I was a republican (although I knew nothing about politics and was just identifying with my parents).

Then I started studying Soci and my entire perspective on the world changed. It opened my eyes and forced me to look beyond my tunnel vision of society. It was really hard at times to come to terms with things that I thought I already understood, especially social issues that I had never thought about before or issues that had always been presented to me in a one-sided, biased manner.

A good example of this is the trope of the Welfare Queen. I was told that poor people, esp. poor black people, were moochers and only wanted handouts because they were lazy and didn't want to get a job. Of course, I learned that the Welfare Queen (and welfare "fraud") is a myth that was promulgated by Ronald Regan in order to stigmatize people in poverty so that he could convince Americans that rolling back the social safety net was justified because it was only being used by poor black (read: undeserving) citizens. The truth is that most people on welfare do have jobs (i.e. the 'working poor'). Also, the welfare reforms of 1996 created a 5-year maximum lifetime cap on benefits so that welfare "cheaters" (which did not exist anywhere near the level that we're often told) were literally unable to collect benefits for life (also, contrary to popular opinion, women do not have more babies to get more benefits. In fact, if a woman has a child while receiving benefits, she and her family will be removed from the rolls). Welfare is probably one of the least understood/mischaracterized social issue in American society.

Science in general is often met with the sting of anti-intellectualism, which is part of the answer to your question. However, I think social science in particular gets it worse than the 'natural' sciences like Biology and Chemistry. I used to say that it was because people were generally more suspect of social sciences, but I think it's more than that. People like to dismiss facts about social issues that they don't agree with or have a different view on because it's much easier to disagree that we live in a post-racial society (we don't) than it is to disagree on the functions of bodily organs. People also tend to conflate their individual life experiences with overall reality (i.e. "well, i've never experienced [blank] so it must not be true or its exaggerated" or "well, I know someone who is [blank] but [blank] doesn't happen to them"). You get what I am saying here? Most people don't question or critically think about social norms or commonsense 'truths' because these 'truths' are so embedded in our milieu that its hard to imagine otherwise. So instead of thinking critically, people dismiss sociological knowledge as either "elitist" or "not real science" so that they can remain undisturbed in their own little worlds.

Once I saw a question on r/askreddit that asked what the slogan of your college major or job would be. I would say, "Sociology: reminding people of uncomfortable truths since 1838" or "Sociology: everything you were taught about society was a big lie" lol.

I'm sorry I can't find any literature for you, but I can recommend these instead:

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.

First and foremost, I strongly recommend you cross-post this to /r/askphilosophy (and probably also /r/philosophyofreligion) since they'll be much more qualified than here to suggest topics and lesson-plans.

Second, you should probably include the Leibnizian cosmological argument alongside the Kalam, since they are sufficiently different. There's plenty of good material out there on this: Pruss' article for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (this book is a very good resource, see here for more chapters) is pretty definitive, but both he and Richard Gale have written stuff on this.

Third, I think you should use different atheistic arguments. Drop Russell's teapot: especially given your expected audience you should stick to positive arguments against the existence of God. Russell's teapot you can work in as a side comment that argues that if the negative case (i.e. refuting theistic arguments) succeeds then we should be atheists, but other wise leave it be. Better topics I think would be the Argument from Non-Belief (see also here) and Hume's argument against belief in miracles (I have a bunch of resources on this I can send you, but the original argument in Of Miracles is pretty short and is free online). You might want to read one of Mackie's The Miracle of Theism, Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification or Oppy's Arguing About Gods for a good source of atheistic critiques and arguments.

I can't offer you squat on job hunting, but I used to be a water lawyer here in California and if you want to read an insanely interesting book, that will always up your interest with anyone in any part of the water business in the US (or probably Canada, too), read Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, which all about the history of the aquafication of the West. Looks like you are Europe-based from your job applications, but it is a fascinating story well worth your time.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

This doesn't actually answer your question but if this is a topic you're interested in, you should consider checking out The Discoverers. Daniel J. Boorstin covers the history of clock making and why it rose to such prominence in some countries and not others, and he places it in a greater context of innovation and technology and man's attempts to understand the world around him. It can be a bit dry at times, but it is thorough and the topics at hand are very interesting.

Granted, I'm no expert, and it's only one, non-primary source. But I'd say it's worth the read.

That ELI5 is, of course by nature, too simplistic. The Germans didn't "install the Tutsi into power". Instead, Rwanda as it exists today is one of the few countries where the current borders pretty closely approximate with the borders of a complex hierarchical kingdom that existed before the country became a colony.

Colonial powers prefer using existing governing structures as it saves them the time and effort to set up an entire administrative system of their own, and in the case of Rwanda, this was easier than usual. They simply solidified the existing system, so in their eyes, at this point they weren't inducing volatility at all, but strengthening a stable system.

After WWI, the Belgians took over the administrative functions and they not only continued to rely on these governing structures, but, guided by the racist and eugenics movements of the time, came up with a racial explanation for the Tutsi rule: their superiority was demonstrated by their lighter skin, aquiline nose, tall stature, etc. as opposed to the broad-nosed, darker and shorter Hutus. According to this new racial mythology, Hutu were Bantus while the Tutsi were part-Caucasian.

So they didn't intend to induce volatility, but they certainly weren't well-intentioned when they decided how to rule. As to direct economic gain, Rwanda has few resources and covers a small and landlocked territory, but it was well-suited for cash crop production of mainly coffee and some tea.

This is another important cause of the volatility of the country in itself. The post-colonial one-party dictatorship under Hutu rule relied almost entirely on a mix of foreign aid and profits from the coffee trade, and purposely kept the country rural and the population uneducated in order to maximize the exploitability of its only profitable natural resource.

When coffee prices plummeted in the late 1980ies, this caused serious problems for the regime as both the international and domestic communities as well as the exiled Tutsi community in Uganda mounted a serious opposition to the dictatorship. They were eventually forced to agree to political reforms, but hard-liners who were unwilling to relinquish their power seized control after the assassination (probably by the RPF - Tutsi rebels from Uganda) of the President, were able to use the years of anti-Tutsi propaganda, trained submission through dictatorship, and fears about the rebels from Uganda to organize the genocide.


There still is a lot more to it, and it is also interesting, but worrying to see many parallels between the current post-genocide Tutsi government and the pre-genocide Hutu government. I mostly based the above on academic sources, but more accessible reading I could recommend about the country and the region would include Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and anything by Prunier and Mamdani. Jared Diamond's Collapse has a chapter on Rwanda which focuses on the economic dimension; it's a bit controversial, but based on some very interesting research.

I am not a scientist, I am a historian, however... if you would like to know some academic titles that go to the route of the problem I can suggest Coming Out Under Fire and Gay New York. Neither book is directly about the now debunked decision that homosexuality was a mental disorder but both make multiple references to it and Coming Out Under Fire is a book that deals with some of the immediate backlash of that not-so-scientific, scientific claim.

the short version of the history here though is that in 1952 it was put into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the APA. This was a political move and a result of 60 years of cultural shift. What had happened since 1890 is really the birth of a gay identity. Until this time, people had discussed homosexuality in obscure medical contexts or works like Krafft-Ebing's work Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study (1886) which concluded that it was a degeneration and talked about it more like a fetish. Later in his life after more work on the subject he retracted that hypothesis. A bit later Havelock Ellis and John Symonds came along. Their work concluded that Homosexuality was definitely not a disease but instead variation of sexuality. Then in 1948 the first Kinsey Report came out in which he definitively stated "Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual." The findings of his research was that sexuality is a range, its not black and white. This was all well before the APA's ruling.

Shortly after the ruling the work of Evelyn Hooker, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual came out which determined that homosexuals could be perfectly well adjusted humans. The next Kinsey Report came out in 1953 and with that he once again concluded that sexuality was not black and white. According to him 37% of males and 13% of females had some sort of homosexual experience to orgasm in their lifetime. So to say somebody was exclusively heterosexual would be difficult.

Further supporting evidence of the political or social nature of the initial decision can be see in the APA's decision to remove it from their list of mental disorders. Stonewall has happened in 1969 and the entire gay liberation and gay rights movement has become very visible in media and in the public eye. Probably because of this, when the decision was made to remove it as an officially classified disorder it was also accompanied with a statement from the APA that supported the civil rights of homosexuals.

Because Trump has virtually zero support from his own party. Because Trump is remarkably unpopular with voters. There's no such headline as "Unpopular man with no allies defeats national party that comes together to support opponent."

There's so much good reporting out there from excellent political scientists and numbers folks, in a calmer world we'd shrug Trump off and go back to looking at the serious candidates.

538 continually puts out good articles:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/beware-a-gop-calendar-front-loaded-with-states-friendly-to-trump-and-cruz/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-really-unpopular-with-general-election-voters/

And I also like Jonathan Bernstein, who is one of the best: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-07/party-elites-not-voters-will-choose-2016-nominees - who refers to this awesome book as well - http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Decides-Presidential-Nominations/dp/0226112373

Remember, this is a primary. A primary is for a party to choose who will represent them in a presidential campaign. The people who run the party and do the most work in it have the most influence and collectively choose that candidate. Rightfully so, I think. Voters help, so do special interest groups, party-aligned media, etc etc. There are a ton of varied interests all working together and all trying to come together. It's democracy, and it's amazing. And a guy like Trump or Cruz can't just waltz in, be an asshole to everyone, and win.

Imagine going into your office tomorrow. You've been there maybe only a couple of years. Maybe it's your first day. First thing you do is call your bosses idiots, then you heroically pump up your colleagues to follow you, only to side step. You let them take the fall, effectively stabbing them in the back.

After doing this for a while, you announce your plan to run for company CEO.

Who is going to support you?

And yes, Cruz and Trump could win a state or two. Let's say you won a floor of your building, a floor not of peers, but of lower workers. You've gone down there talking shit about the CEO and what you'll do to kick them out. Populist stuff, basically.

Any sane person would say "ok, that's enough of this" and find one person they can throw their entire weight against to beat you.

Seriously, this stuff happens every cycle on both sides, since at least the 80s.

In no world does a candidate make an enemy out of their entire home team and win control over that team.

When people learn a second language, the structural differences between the first and second languages tend to be the hardest to pick up. For example, if your first language doesn't have honorific speech levels like Japanese or Korean, then you may never pick them up if you can communicate (albeit roughly) without them. Another example might be a complex case system like Russian. If you can make yourself understood in the second language without all the subtlety of total mastery then you may never take the time (or even be able) to master it.

The history of England (and the British Isles in general) is one of repeated invasion. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes displaced the Britons. The Vikings invaded and displaced the locals. Then the Normans invaded a thousand years ago and replaced the elite. Each invasion and displacement rubbed away some of the complexities as locals and invaders alike learned to communicate, and each introduced a layer of vocabulary. As a consequence, English now has very few of the grammatical features that make Germanic languages Germanic. John McWhorter put it like this:

> English's Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer - antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on - antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has.

For a very easy introduction to English (and the source of that wonderful analogy) see Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

> After the war, the Great Migration caused thousands to leave their homes for a better life in the North and in Canada.

One of the best books I've read on the Great Migration is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. A wonderful read, it's about three individuals who do just as you say, move to find a better life away from the oppression of Jim Crow.

edit: accidentally some words

In my eyes "The day the world came to town" is the most HFY book that exists, mainly because it's true. There's no humans being better than everyone and generally being loudmouthed warmongers, but you still read with a smile on your face and think "I'm glad I'm human"

The book describtion:
"For the better part of a week, nearly every man, woman, and child in Gander and the surrounding smaller towns stopped what they were doing so they could help. They placed their lives on hold for a group of strangers and asked for nothing in return. They affirmed the basic goodness of man at a time when it was easy to doubt such humanity still existed."

amazon link

I'm assuming by medieval/renaissance you mean the traditional European inspired fantasy. Here's a brain dump:

Feudalism:
I feel like I see a lot of fantasy where heroes turn up at some village and get asked to fight someone or other because the villagers have nowhere else to turn to. What I don't often see is the local knight living in the manor across the field whose responsibility it is to be a warrior and protect his fief and who probably doesn't appreciate strangers turning up and undermining his authority by doing his job for him.

There would probably also be a lot of small wars going on at any given time between knights and barons and earls that provide lots of work for dangerous people but have nothing to do with the greater battle battle between good and evil.

Knighthood:
Speaking of knights a knight isn't "someone who fights with plate armour and a sword," that's what they were IRL because that was the most effective way to fight and you needed a certain amount of wealth and status to afford the huge investment in training and equipment. If you have a fantasy world where with enough training and expensive equipment people can learn to shoot fire and call down lightning that will break a cavalry charge then that world's knights will almost certainly all be wizards. And very few other people will be allowed to be.

Era-appropriate firearms:

• https://www.pinterest.nz/pin/538672805409922868
  
• https://www.pinterest.nz/pin/511721576383944160
  
  That aesthetic of people in plate armour with cannons is something you almost never see depicted.
  
  Renaissance fashion:
  
• https://i-h1.pinimg.com/564x/67/7c/4d/677c4de51094fe521abab26318dc5f19.jpg
  
• http://blog.sunandswords.com/post/143679221560/some-awesome-photos-taken-last-week-of-my-kit
  
• https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ae/56/85/ae5685d3f34f0a1a777ca2a587d8cf54.jpg
  
  Speaks for itself.
  
  Medieval medicine and science:
  A physician diagnosing you by cross referencing your symptoms with the alignment of the stars to decide how to properly balance your humors isn't something I've seen a lot of in fantasy. That element of earnestly applying the scientific method to things you don't understand based on what seem to us like completely ridiculous variables and assumptions. Also more folk medicine like plants that only had medicinal properties if you found them by accident or sympathetic magic like curing a rabid dog bite using the literal hair of the dog that bit you.
  
  On a similar note you don't see a lot of importance put on folk superstition like hanging horseshoes above doors to keep out evil spirits/the devil/elves trying to steal your children. I feel like basing a fantasy world's idea of magic around the small everyday things might make a change from the usual Big Magic stuff.
  
  
  The equator:
  Not really something that will affect the day-to-day feel of a world but I read once that some people believed that the equator was hotter because it was closer to the sun and that right on the equator it would be too hot for anything to survive or cross. So they thought the entire southern hemisphere was inaccessible due to this deadly heat barrier. Not sure what you could do with it but I thought it was a neat idea. Maybe the discovery or creation of a tunnel under the equator would be an interesting way to introducing a "new world" to explore that developed totally independently.
  
  The devil:
  You know where medieval people got magic powers? By serving the devil. You know how they became werewolves? Made a deal with the devil. You know how women learned arithmetic? You better believe that's the devil. A lot of fantasy treats the monsters and magic and whatnot as just the natural flora and fauna of the world but these days I don't feel like I've seen much that filters the world through that lens of everything comes from one or two sources that have strong moral stances associated with them and, therefore, everything that comes from them does too.
  
  Pilgrimages:
  I don't know, you just never see them in fantasy but in the middle ages they were quite the thing from the noble woman who spends ten years of her life travelling constantly between holy sites to the common folk for whom the trip to visit the bones of St Whoever is basically the closest they ever have to a holiday.
  
  Ships:
  Don't have your medieval knights cross the sea on what amounts to a 17th century galleon like I feel like I keep seeing. Not when there are cool medieval and renaissance ships you could use:
  
• Byzantine Dromon: https://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/tag/dromon/
  
• Venetian Galleass: https://www.deviantart.com/radojavor/art/Battle-Of-Lepanto-41693977
  
• Look, we built towers on it and now it's a war ship: http://users.trytel.com/tristan/towns/florilegium/images2/def14b.jpg
  
  Level of material wealth/standard of living:
  When you turn up in a sleepy little farming village there probably won't be a big inn with a roaring fire, a dinner menu and a dozen rentable rooms. There will be a family that'll let you sleep on the floor of their one-room cottage for a few coins and might even share some of their latest batch of beer with you. Even the lord of the castle may very well sleep in the same room as their whole family and several servants. When you try to sell your stack of looted swords to the local blacksmith they aren't going to have cash sitting around to pay you. But they could offer you a box of nails and some of the loaves of bread the baker owes them.
  
  Little things:
  I feel like a lot of the reason "medieval" fantasy tends to feel stale is that it's mostly made up of just all the bits and pieces of history that people are familiar with smooshed together. Good for acccessibility, bad for originality. Often just adding little details or taking away familiar things can make a difference. Look up the things they had in place of anything resembling modern law enforcement like Tithings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithing) and the Hue and Cry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry) or people bringing their own mugs to taverns because the taverns couldn't just buy bulk mugs off the shelf or the fact that it could take members of ten different guilds to make a suit of armour and anyone trying to do the bits that are covered by another guild will find themselves out of work pretty quick. Maybe read something like https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571. Look up medieval bestiaries to learn how lions are born dead and brought to life by their mothers or how vultures can see the future.

May I suggest that you read The Oxford Annotated Bible.

Once you are done with that ... may I suggest

• The Discoverers
  
• The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
  
• The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Knowledge
  
  
  All three of these books dissect imagination, creativity and the human existence. I encourage anyone who has been a JW to read these books. I was raised from infancy to be a JW and I struggled to understand mankind's history, achievements and appreciation to where we are today.
  
  Mind you ... this is a meal literary Guinness with a steak dinner vs Bible is just a wine spritzer and salad.

I find JRPGs fascinating, particularly the early games; they took D&D in an almost retro direction, skipping over a lot of character customization and emphasizing exploration of a huge, monster-filled landscape. It's like they refocused on the games that inspired D&D, making modern fantasy-themed miniatures wargames.

I heartily recommend Jon Peterson's Playing at the World for a deep history of role-playing games. You might also be interested in The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games, The Fantasy RPG: A New Performing Art, and Gaming as Culture. And my book, of course.

There are definitely games that rely too much on the Tolkien tropes, but overall, I think it's not a problem --there's so many good RPGs that have nothing to do with fantasy at all, and plenty of great sword & sorcery games that bring their own ideas to the table.

Any book by Mary Roach- her books are hilarious, random, and informative. I like Jon Krakauer's, Sarah Vowell's, and Bill Bryson's books as well.

Some of my favorites that I can think of offhand (as another poster mentioned, I loved Devil in the White City)

No Picnic on Mount Kenya

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Collapse

The Closing of the Western Mind

What is the What

A Long Way Gone

Alliance of Enemies

The Lucifer Effect

The World Without Us

What the Dog Saw

The God Delusion (you'd probably enjoy Richard Dawkins' other books as well if you like science)

One Down, One Dead

Lust for Life

Lost in Shangri-La

Endurance

True Story

Havana Nocturne

Wings by Tom D. Crouch is good. He was the curator of the National Air & Space Museum (Smithsonian), and it's basically a history of all development of flight and flying machines.

If you liked The Right Stuff, I'd also recommend Man on the Moon. It's more specific to what follows the Mercury astronauts obviously (Gemini and Apollo), but it is quite good.

The Right Stuff movie is pretty good, too, if you haven't seen it. It's on Netflix Instant View (or at least was as recently as a few months ago).

All well and good to accuse people of being shills, but that doesn't make them wrong. Silver and Enten have both addressed why the missed on trump several times. As I'm sure you would agree that a lot was different this election. Most notably divergence from traditionally held ideas about primary contests and the effect of party elites. Even in this year at least on the dem side Endorsements turned out to be a pretty good predictor.

It seems to me that the two strengths of the series are world-building and character depth. If this is your favorite series, you probably like it for one or both of those things.

If you like it for the world building, I recommend history books such as the History of the Peloponnesian War or A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

If you like complex characters, then the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. Another strength of asoiaf is that it isn't too heavy handed regarding magic in the story, and this is a strength of the Mistborn series too.

In general, academic philosophy of religion is dominated by theistic philosophers, so there aren't many works defending atheism and atheistic arguments in the professional literature.

But there are still a few notable books:

• J.L Mackie's The Miracle of Theism is considered a classic, but it's a bit outdated by now. Although Mackie focuses more on critiquing the arguments for God's existence rather than outright defending atheism, he is no doubt coming from an atheistic point of view.
  
• Michael Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification is a lengthy book with the ambitious goal of showing atheism is the justified and rational philosophical position, while theism is not.
  
• Nicholas Everitt's The Non-existence of God is maybe one of the most accessible books in the "case for atheism" genre written by a professional philosopher. He even presents a new argument against god's existence.
  
• If you're more into debates, God?: A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist is a written debate between atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and famous Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig. It's far better than any debate WLC had with any of the New Atheists in my humble opinion.
  
• On the more Continental side of things, there a few works that could be mentioned. There's Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (although I must admit I didn't read it myself, so I can't attest to how good it is) and of course any work by the atheist existentialists, a good place to start will by Jean-paul Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism.
  
  I didn't add him because others have already mentioned him, but everything written by Graham Oppy is fantastic IMO. He is maybe the leading atheist philosopher in the field of philosophy of religion. A good place to start with his writings is his 2013 paper on arguments for atheism.

>rather suddenly, came abstract thought, art, religion, jewelry, and eventually things like language and alphabets. Our consciousness greatly leaped forwards, and began exponentially increasing on such a level that it still hasn't stopped. Interestingly, interference from something like Set is by far more parsimonious than the entire humans species magically sharing the same mutation which overwrites the previous genetic makeup of the whole species, or even worse, having a massive leap forwards as some sort of uncaused event.

Some have argued that not all ethnic groups were equally involved in that leap, and that we only know of the advances of those which did.

>Scientists have long believed that the 'great leap forward' that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked the end of significant biological evolution in humans. In this stunning account of our evolutionary history, top scholars Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending reject this conventional wisdom and reveal that the human species has undergone a storm of genetic change much more recently. Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilisation arose, they contend, and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews' rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the early Indo-Europeans that allowed for a new way of life, increased disease resistance among the Europeans settling America, and new versions of neurological genes among European Jews. Ranging across subjects as diverse as human domestication, Neanderthal hybridization, and IQ tests, Cochran and Harpending's analysis demonstrates convincingly that human genetics have changed and can continue to change much more rapidly than scientists have previously believed.

>I really dislike this need for a perfect, Platonic ideal of a hero.

http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0684818868

This book handles the concept really well. I think the argument Loewen is making is that we actually, in some way, diminish the accomplishments of great people by presenting them as completely entirely flawless, rather than human.

It's interesting how exposure influences perception of language. I found that word as a young child because I read books for teenagers, I think it was in a British novel from a few decades ago. Maybe CS Lewis, Narnia and such. It would've been from that generation and it had to be fiction.

On the one hand you've got someone that thinks it sounds derogatory and the other hand I think that sounds a bit silly. But it's down to experience and familiarity. Relative stuff. It doesn't make them dumb, it merely displays their thought process.

Yesterday I found someone that thought something was being falsely wordy and just throwing a thesaurus at a paragraph. It was actually a very specific and efficient description of a programming library and the environment/data it was designed for. It made sense to me apart from some terms relating to neural networks, it didn't even use many complex words, but he just thought it was someone being disingenuous.

That perception issue is a large driving force behind anti-intellectualism. Perceiving intelligent or complicated things as negative, bad, or of ill intent/purpose. Through the right light even this comment could find issue with someone due to the verbosity in the midst of the thread. But it's just late and I blab when I'm tired!

If you find perception at all interesting in this context I highly recommend the classic 'Anti-intellectualism in American Life' (wikipedia, Amazon) for an observation of political and social thought up to the 1950s. A really novel bit of nonfiction. Today the idea is still alive and well, but you may know of it now from mainstream media as a "Cult of Ignorance".

I'd like to also CYA because /u/CAPS_IS_LOCKED is definitely not related to that. It was just tangentially related to the initial view of something. I don't want people thinking I think this is actually about them!

A Man on the Moon by Andy Chaiken is considered THE text on the Apollo program. If formed the basis of the mini series From the Earth to the Moon

Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz is a wonderful first hand account of life in the trenches from Mercury thru Apollo.

And my personal favorite space book - Roving Mars which was turned into a great IMAX movie as well.

Confrontational atheism: Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier

>"Know, then, my friends, that everything that is recited and practiced in the world for the cult and adoration of gods is nothing but errors, abuses, illusions, and impostures. All the laws and orders that are issued in the name and authority of God or the gods are really only human inventions…."

>"And what I say here in general about the vanity and falsity of the religions of the world, I don’t say only about the foreign and pagan religions, which you already regard as false, but I say it as well about your Christian religion because, as a matter of fact, it is no less vain or less false than any other.



Softer (much less confrontational) atheism: 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God

>This unique approach to skepticism presents fifty commonly heard reasons people often give for believing in a God and then raises legitimate questions regarding these reasons, showing in each case that there is much room for doubt. Whether you're a believer, a complete skeptic, or somewhere in between, you'll find this review of traditional and more recent arguments for the existence of God refreshing, approachable, and enlightening.



Favorites non-fiction (or at least mostly non-fiction as time will tell) and not directly related to atheism: Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension and The Illustrated A Brief History of Time and the Universe in a Nutshell



Favorites fiction (also not directly atheist related): Treasure Island, and Hogfather: A Novel of Discworld



Atheism book I've tried to read and found to be over my head that's supposed to be the end-all-be-all: The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God

***

Currently reading and while enjoyable it's a bit tough to get, I've found myself re-reading pages regularly: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

You wanted to be part of the intelligentsia, but throughout your philosophical journey, you always based your convictions only on authority and tradition instead of on evidence and arguments. Don't you realize that this is the epitome of anti – intellectualism?

It is correct that the New Atheists aren't the pinnacle of atheistic thought and didn't contribute many new ideas to the academic debate of atheism vs. theism or religion. But this was never their goal, and it is also unnecessary, since the academic debate is already over for many decades. If you want to know why the arguments for theism are all complete nonsense and not taken seriously anymore, why Christianity is wrong just about everything and why apologists like Craig are dishonest charlatans who make a living out of fooling people, your reading list shouldn't be New Atheists, but rather something like this:

Colin Howson – Objecting to God

George H. Smith – Atheism: The Case Against God

Graham Oppy – Arguing about Gods

Graham Oppy – The Best Argument Against God

Herman Philipse – God in the Age of Science

J. L. Mackie – The Miracle of Theism

J. L. Schellenberg – The Wisdom to Doubt

Jordan Sobel – Logic and Theism

Nicholas Everitt – The Non-Existence of God

Richard Gale – On the Nature and Existence of God

Robin Le Poidevin – Arguing for Atheism

Stewart Elliott Guthrie – Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

Theodore Drange – Nonbelief & Evil



[Avigor Shinan – From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0827609086)

Bart Ehrman – The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

Bart Ehrman – Jesus, Interrupted

Bart Ehrman – Misquoting Jesus

Burton L. Mack – Who Wrote the New Testament?

Helmut Koester – Ancient Christian Gospels

John Barton, John Muddiman – The Oxford Bible Commentary

John Dominic Crossan – Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

Karen Armstrong – A History of God

Mark Smith – The Early History of God

Randel McCraw Helms – Who Wrote the Gospels?

Richard Elliott Friedman – Who Wrote the Bible?

Robert Bellah – Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Robert Walter Funk – The Gospel of Jesus

The 10,000 Year Explosion answers your exact question.

> Scientists have long believed that the “great leap forward” that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked the end of significant biological evolution in humans. In this stunningly original account of our evolutionary history, top scholars Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending reject this conventional wisdom and reveal that the human species has undergone a storm of genetic change much more recently. Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilization arose, they contend, and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews' rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the early Indo-Europeans that allowed for a new way of life, increased disease resistance among the Europeans settling America, and new versions of neurological genes among European Jews. Ranging across subjects as diverse as human domestication, Neanderthal hybridization, and IQ tests, Cochran and Harpending's analysis demonstrates convincingly that human genetics have changed and can continue to change much more rapidly than scientists have previously believed. A provocative and fascinating new look at human evolution that turns conventional wisdom on its head, The 10,000 Year Explosion reveals the ongoing interplay between culture and biology in the making of the human race.

I keep running into people who think that Hillary cleared the field just by convincing everyone that she was the best person for the job and balk at the idea that she locked up intra-party support by boxing out potential challengers from party institutions so she wouldn't get obama'd. I've got a couple sources to that effect but I could use more. Here's the way i put it:

>It's access to donors, access to policy think tanks, and access to key interest groups etc. The main theroetical text that's cited by political commenters is the party decides. By their very nature, field-clearing is a secretive process that happens behind closed doors, because making such discussions public is inherently damaging to the legitimacy of the primary process.

>A few examples that were made public:

>Warren was told by donors not to run

>Biden was told by Obama not to run

>Wonks: "Clinton has achieved such overwhelming party insider support that the Sanders campaign is largely cut off from access to the kind of para-party policy wonk universe that would allow Sanders to release campaign proposals that pass muster by the traditional rules of the game."

>The belief that everyone lined up behind hillary because of admiration and the idea that a primary was damaging (which isn't empirically true, but remains a talking point anyway) was a polite fiction designed to foster primary unity.

Seconded; for a great history of this, check out Cadillac Desert

Also, one problem I have with this graphic is how the United States is treated as a single entity. While the West is running out of water, the Great Lakes region sits on 1/5 of the world's available fresh water. To this day one of America's strengths is abundant natural resources.

That's a great question. I'm not a sociologist, but even many researchers will tell you there isn't a single answer for the definitive rise in social isolation. To make some sweeping, general claims, it largely has to do with:

• Moving from tight-knit communities to large cities
  
• More Americans living alone (25% of the US population.)
  
• Less involvement in community institutions (church, synagogue, community centers, supper clubs, etc.) – Bowling Alone is a great read on this.
  
• More controversial, but our reliance on technology for connection. We all have a tendency to conflate surface connections with true intimacy, but the size of your network has no effect on your level of loneliness. Loneliness is better understood by a lack of supportive outlets, instead of simply not being around people. Technology can be great for intimate or surface connections, but social media is generally geared toward the latter.
  
  And right! The study you reference might be the General Social Survey from U Chicago. It's really astounding that it's hard to talk about loneliness publicly, considering the former surgeon general labeled it an epidemic. Hard to believe there can still be a stigma about something affecting so many people.
  
  If you're interested in this, two great books I recommend are The Village Effect and The Lonely American. Both have excellent theories and explanations.

"no scientific consensus that black people are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence"

The report is by the APA from 1996. The APA in 96 to even acknowledge that there was a gap was a huge thing, considering its bias. Discoveries have ramped up in the last few years so I don't know why wikipedia is relying on sources from 94 & 96 considering the human genome mapping wasn't completed until 2003. Discoveries since then have been one after another.

It's no surprise wikipedia comes to the PC conclusion, but it suffers from problems. It acknowledges that the black-white test gap exists. Either it is genetic, or environmental. There has been decades of money, and time thrown at fixing the environment by rich billionaires like Gates, and others. Dozens upon dozens of education, nutrition, parent swapping (giving black babies to whites), and other experiments, and they all failed. There is not a single study in the world that can claim lasting gains in the IQ gap. This bit of evidence would point to a genetic basis right? That and the fact that twin studies (the only proper studies that can control for genes) shows intelligence, among other dispositions, are highly heritable. In that wikipedia page, they link to the actual numbers from the APA study: "A 1996 statement by the American Psychological Association gave about .45 for children and about .75 during and after adolescence."

Finally, does that statement even pass the laugh test? "Science" doesn't work by consensus, but if it did, wouldn't it be relevant to ask the actual scientists involved in intelligence research?

There are people with very high intelligence, very low IQ, and everyone between. Most people can recognize that height is highly heritable, but it isn't a guarantee, sometimes you are taller than your tallest parent, sometimes you are shorter than the shortest parents. Most times you regress towards the mean. The idea that the brain is a blank slate has been discredited by Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and others. The brain comes with innate abilities, abilities that are partly inherited from your parents genes.

If you are actually concerned with finding the truth you can read Nicholas Wade, who writes for the NYTimes. The 10,000 Year Explosion. Or Gene Expression1. Or Gene Expression2. Rather than having your views filtered by whoever happens to be editing one of the many wikipedia pages.

This is frustrating. I agree with Maher on his point, but he really should have prepared himself to explain it. He just made a statement and didn't really bother to discuss it further... and in my opinion, that's probably part of the problem of American stupidity. Nobody has the patience to listen to further explanations or intellectual discussions.

I suggest to anyone interested in this topic to read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It was written in 1964, and won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction that year... but it is still extremely relevant today.

So, if you knew the position of every atom in the universe, you could write perfect history? So what?

One of the difficult things about history is you have limited evidence. Every written document from Anglo-Saxon England we possess would fit into a small box. The largest amount of surviving text we have from Ancient Rome is monument and gravestone inscriptions.

Our most sophisticated computer models can't predict the weather in 10 days or the stock market opening tomorrow, and we know way more about the current prices of stocks or the current weather data than we do about, say, Ancient Sparta. The data for any model based approach just isn't there. It some ways, environmental determinism in history is like being given a puddle of water and the room temperature and trying to figure out what the ice cube looked like.

There's a reason economic determinism in history has gone out of fashion, and that ecological determinism never really went in: it's a less useful model for understanding why things happen compared with a more nuanced approach.

FWIW, Diamond's follow up book, Collapse contained several sections specifically rebutting the suggestion that he was an "environmental determinist."

Great conversation starter.

You have peaked my interest. In your ethical point of view, who's money is your money?

As for the people of Haiti, do they work harder to survive? Has the developed world influenced their country more than say the Domicanan?

If you want a good book on this and many other things, check this out.

https://www.amazon.com/Under-Black-Flag-Romance-Reality/dp/081297722X is one of the best nonfiction book on pirates.

If you want a sword & sorcery, fantasy version of pirates, Red Seas Under Red Skies is a great read. If you want just piratey fiction, Captain Blood is one of the best pirate books. It's older, but still in print. I love that thing!

Playing at the World by Jon Peterson is exactly what you are looking for. First and final chapters is the history of D&D itself while the middle chapters are a much more technical look at how the core mechanics evolved from wargaming starting back from chess variants and evolving to the system in the original D&D. It also looks at the gaming and fantasy culture that played a huge part in shaping D&D.

While I found it simply fascinating how so many things happened at just the right time and the right people came together and how things connect. It is mind blowing honestly. I can't recommend the book enough.

If you are new to D&D I do recommend getting a hold of some PDFs of the original rules and giving them a read so you know what they are talking about a bit more. Something I wish I had done, but it didn't hamper my fascination or enjoyment at all.

Black people are concentrated in urban areas in the US as a direct consequence of discriminatory mortgage lending and realty practices in the mid 20th century that forced them into de-facto segregated neighborhoods.

Now, granted. Dems have taken advantage of that concentration to use these folks as a power base constituency. But those neighborhood circumstances were not created for political advantage. They were created to marginalize black people as much as possible during the period now known as the Great Migration when so many were fleeing the Jim Crow south.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679763880/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_vlJkDbTN6HPGS

Well yeah because they ruin the experience, for the most part they are new to all of this. It's like a frat party with kegs and people just going to get fucked up and get laid. I've been guilty of being a snob too, I just want to see things progress. I think music has an effect on society as well. It's complicated but I think if we can get a good combination of fun and deep music it will have a profound effect. I saw what happened when hip hop became all about vip and same thing is happening with dance music.

I think the problem with music in general is that commercial side becomes anti-intellectual and the underground get's marginalized, and can then become elitist, which sometimes leads to the death of both and that's why we have cycles in music. It's so much more complicated, but you can blame big business like live nation and clear channel for that, the agencies, the artists..greed in general.

Check this stuff out, want to see more of this

http://www.businessinsider.com/bottle-service-is-over-at-nyc-clubs-2013-3

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/arts/music/pacha-in-ibiza-feels-dance-clubs-center-of-gravity-shift.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

Less of this.

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370284623&sr=8-1&keywords=hofstadter+anti-intellectualism

Basically it all needs to come together, and I'd like to think we are headed in that direction. Thanks to the Interwebs.

Since it hasn't been mentioned, Cochran has a blog called "West Hunter", which I consider recommended reading -- although many posts are sadly a bit low effort, compared to e.g. SSC, Overcoming Bias, or other favourites among the rationalist crowd. Still definitely worth adding to your blog roll.

And his book with Henry Harpending, "The 10'000 Year Explosion", is required reading for anyone curious about the HBD debate, of course. :)

> (2:07:00) A few people bet on Trump winning after Greg wrote predicting the “shy Trump voter” would put him over the top despite the polls, and then tipped him for it.

Just to pat my own back here: I made about $4000, betting on Trump winning. Not because of Cochran, I hadn't read his post, but because I noticed there was a huge gap between the bookmakers and the exit polls reported at Nate Silver's 538. So betting big on Trump late on election day seemed like a no brainer. In particular so because exit polls usually underestimate the most controversial pick, due to social desirability bias.

Also, I've never seen such an edge at a bookmaker before, compared to an "expert opinion", and I bet professionally on sports for about a year (until I quit when it became too much effort to work around the bookmakers' restrictions on winning players). IIRC, bookmaker odds had Trump at about 16-17% of winning, late on election day, while the exit polls indicated about a 28% chance of winning.

By the Kelly criterion I should have bet way more on the outcome than I did, btw. Assuming the exit polls were right, I should have gone in for about 13% of my betting bankroll. Considering the known bias of exit polls, I should probably have pushed for more like ~25% of my bankroll. But I chickened out, for personal reasons. Being a father of 3 young kids combines badly with being a gambler, so I just played my scared money and bet the $600ish I happened to have sitting around in an online bookie account from old.

Read this if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214

Chauncey taught "U.S. Lesbian and Gay History" last fall, and after hearing him reconstruct U.S. sexual history through his unique gloss, I actually felt like I understood myself a lot better in the context of not only today's gay culture. I appreciate a lot more deeply now how the way I interact with and feel around other gay men didn't just pop out of nowhere. Seriously; I really recommend it.

____

"Short" answer: Legal discrimination, oppressive social norms, and post-WWII pressures to maintain a nuclear family structure pushed gay life "underground" and created a collective consciousness. Once gay people understood sexual orientation to be an identity category, (similar to race or gender or class), spaces unique to gay men began to form their own counterculture. In such spaces, where secrecy and discretion were critical to maintaining a "double life," traditional relationship structures like monogamy didn't often fit the bill. On the flip side, these spaces afforded the privacy necessary to play with norms (e.g. drag). Many features of contemporary gay life are thus remnants of this past, and the fact that gay people can even imagine living a suburban life with 2.5 kids, white picket fences, and a happy marriage is an indication of sexual assimilation...well, depending on who you ask.

I obviously glossed over a lot of nuance in that paragraph, but I hope that helps.

Probably the most obvious person to look at is David Graeber as he's probably the best known self-identified anarchist anthropologist. Aside from him, however, you may also be interested in the work of James C. Scott - specifically his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

That being aid, I don't remember if Graeber or Scott actually lay out plans for what an anarchist society would look like.

It's also worth noting, I think, that's there's a big difference between a stateless society and an anarchist one, if by the latter we mean one explicitly organized according to anarchist ideas. A lot of anarchists nowadays point to the EZLN as a model for a contemporary stateless society, which is quite understandable. However I don't believe the EZLN actually considers itself to be anarchist, though I think they're sympathetic.

There are a couple from the great game period, where Russia and Britain were rivaling each other in the central asia. You'll likely find plenty original intelligence officers as authors in the references of Hopkirk's "The Great Game".

> hundred year old talking points

Official redlining didn't start until 1934. Other forms of discrimination and segregation existed during that same time period. For example, the realtors association of Grosse Pointe had an informal racial point system until the 1960s. This is hardly a hundred-year-old issue. Elderly people alive today spent a good portion of their lives living under these conditions. There are plenty of excellent, thoroughly-sourced books on the subject. Enjoy!

1 2 3 4

p.s. Wealth may not last for three generations, but that doesn't necessarily mean that poverty (and its effect) also does not last for three generations. It's much easier to lose wealth than it is to gain it in the first place.

I started to read more when I was trying to unplug. TV/Netflix/phones can really pull you out of reality, make your brain weak as you begin to lose control of your thoughts. Just try not watching TV/youtube for 3 days...why is it so hard? Are we addicted to screens or are we just lazy. Research neuroplasticity, and how you can make your brain work for you (any how you fall into additive traps when you lose control of your attention). A lot of people on here are recommending meditation, I can't stress how important this is.

Start by reading someting that interests you...check out r/suggestmeabook if you need some help. Also, I can recommend some great books:

• Snow Crash - Neil Stephenson // The best cyberpunk/sci-fi roller-coaster of a read I have come across.
  
• The Iliad - Homer / Fagles translaition // Read this to understand the mankind's greatest story about war, violence and masculinity - this is about the Trojan war (well 4 days near the end), and was widely considered to be the Bible for ancient Greeks.
  
• A Man on the Moon - Andrew Chaikin // Fascinating (and accurate) account of NASA's Apollo space program from start to finish.
  
• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed - Ben Rich // Behind-the-scenes account of the Skunk Works program and the incredible achievements they made back in the day.
  
  Best of luck.
  
  

It sounds like you had formal education with multiple years studying the language. Everything worth achieving takes time and effort. You have put in a ton of 'mental reps.'

Good for you. Don't discount your achievements. I tell my daughters the same thing, just because you can do something or know something doesn't mean it easy and it doesn't mean that someone who cannot do it or doesn't know it is lesser or put in less effort. It is easy for you (now), because you have mastered or are on your way to mastering it.

There are native speakers who don't understand or properly use the subjunctive. That doesn't even get into the whole argument that helping verbs aren't necessary and appear to be slowly falling out of use.

If you are interested, and it sounds as though you might be the type of person who would be, a great read is https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

I mean you say that but there have been very clear efforts by the leaders of the republican party to stop Trump. Trumps entire candidacy has pretty much debunked the party decides.

If any of you are interested, I'd suggest Jim DeFede's The Day the World Came to Town. It's a well written account of what went on in Gander, N.L. on Sept. 11 and the following days. Being an Atlantic Canadian, I was impressed by how he captured the whole thing without making Newfies sound like bumpkins. Good read, highly recommended.

>because the rapid demographic shifts from rural to urban areas would have threatened the Republicans' majority in the House.

Ahhh, the Great Migration. Anytime I hear mention of it I feel compelled to recommend The Warmth of Other Suns. It's a fantastic book that's well worth the read.

Be forewarned though; don't read this if you don't want to end up empathizing with black folk, because it'll getcha in the feels.

The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers

http://www.amazon.com/God-Debates-Atheists-Believers-Everyone/dp/1444336428

Actually, this is a great book for both of you.

---------------------------------------------

If he's hard into philosophy:

The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God by J. L. Mackie
http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Theism-Arguments-Against-Existence/dp/019824682X/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302906893&sr=1-4Mackie

The Impossibility of God / The Improbablity of God by Micheal Martin (and others)
http://www.amazon.com/Impossibility-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591021200/ref=pd_sim_b_25
http://www.amazon.com/Improbability-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591023815/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

The Six Ways of Atheism: New Logical Disproofs of the Existence of God
http://www.amazon.com/Six-Ways-Atheism-Disproofs-Existence/dp/0954395662/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302907259&sr=1-1

---------------------------------------------

"The English Passengers" is the latest book I read that I can recommend. I've loaned it to half-a-dozen people this year and they all really liked it.

The "Flashman Papers" are also really absorbing. "Flashman and the Redskins" was the one I stumbled upon first and I enjoyed it so much I ended out reading the whole series.

While not a fiction novel, if you want a book you can't put down, try Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game.

This question gets asked all the time on this sub. I did a search for the term books and compiled this list from the dozens of previous answers:

How to Read the Solar System: A Guide to the Stars and Planets by Christ North and Paul Abel.


A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.


A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.


Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan.


Foundations of Astrophysics by Barbara Ryden and Bradley Peterson.


Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program by Pat Duggins.


An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything by Chris Hadfield.


You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station by Chris Hadfield.


Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the Space Transportation System by Dennis Jenkins.


Wings in Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle, 1971-2010 by Chapline, Hale, Lane, and Lula.


No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time by Claus Jensen.


Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences by Andrew Chaikin.


A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin.


Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA by Amy Teitel.


Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module by Thomas Kelly.


The Scientific Exploration of Venus by Fredric Taylor.


The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.


Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White and Richard Truly.


An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley Carroll and Dale Ostlie.


Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley.


Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Clark.


A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.


Russia in Space by Anatoly Zak.


Rain Of Iron And Ice: The Very Real Threat Of Comet And Asteroid Bombardment by John Lewis.


Mining the Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets by John Lewis.


Asteroid Mining: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John Lewis.


Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris.


The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report by Timothy Ferris.


Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries by Neil deGrasse Tyson.


Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson.


Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson.


The Martian by Andy Weir.


Packing for Mars:The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.


The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution by Frank White.


Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.


The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne.


Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Oddyssey by Joseph Allen.


International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems by Hopkins, Hopkins, and Isakowitz.


The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene.


How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin.


This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows.


The Last Man on the Moon by Eugene Cernan.


Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz.


Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.


The end

PS - /u/DDE93 this list has all the links.

I'd highly recommend the book, "The Day the World Came to Town." A great overview of the story, with many real accounts of the local residents who helped by taking complete strangers into their homes and their lives.

Traveled through Gander about 10 years ago and spent some time chatting with the local book shop owner, who turned me on to the read. 10/10 would read again. Seeing Gander with my own eyes.. it is tiny. The lengths they went to are pretty heartwarming.

Barbra Tuchman's The Guns of August is a personal favorite of mine. Her A Distant Mirror is also supposed to be very good, though I haven't managed to get to it yet.

Carl Sagan is also a great choice if you are interested in space.

No information? You didn't look very carefully. There are whole message boards dedicated solely to the campaigns currently running and modding it.

http://ruinsofmurkhill.proboards.com/

http://odd74.proboards.com/

The modules are easy and cheap to buy: http://www.dmsguild.com/product/28306/ODD-Dungeons--Dragons-Original-Edition-0e

Believe it or not, the rules weren't arbitrary and were playtested extensively. Here's a fantastic document that goes through the rules and the reasons behind them: http://www.grey-elf.com/philotomy.pdf

Here's a popular essay on the playstyle and mindset behind 0th edition. http://www.lulu.com/shop/matthew-finch/quick-primer-for-old-school-gaming/ebook/product-3159558.html

Playing at the World is one of the most well-known book son D&D and it covers the development of 0e in ridiculous detail. https://www.amazon.com/Playing-at-World-Jon-Peterson/dp/0615642047

There's even a youtube channel by that book's author that really fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYnGnADL76LauJhAYPoivA/videos

That's a really interesting question. You might want to take this to /r/linguistics. The change seems to have occurred when Old English (spoken c. 500AD-1100AD) formed out of Proto-Germanic (spoken c. 500BC-500AD).

In Proto-Germanic, the sentences would've been something like this (obviously, I'm not translating everything, just giving you a rough idea):

• This is *es car, ask *immai. (Two different words)
  
  
• This is *ezōz car, ask *ezōi. (Two different words)
  
  In Old English, they would've looked like this:
  
  
• This is his car, ask him. (Two different words)
  
  
• This is hire car, ask hire. (Same word)
  
  Why, I'm not sure. We may not even know - change just happens in languages, sometimes for no reason at all. However, we do know that, the farther back you go in English's history, back through Old English and Proto-Germanic, all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, you can see that noun cases have been dropping like flies. We used to have a very complex system of cases, and now we only have remnants of that (his/him, I/me, etc). You might be interested in reading Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter, which goes into some hypotheses as to why English has simplified so much.

>The problem with RPG design theory is that there are barely any references to speak of.

Look, that's both not entirely true if you actually put in the effort (and you can find many resources right here on this reddit) and not an excuse.

Like any field of study, RPG design can't spontaneously burst forth from a void of knowledge. It stems from other fields of study - in this case game design (RPG Design is, after all, roleplaying game design?), game studies, storytelling, writing, &c.

It's okay if that's not your objective, but from you writing the article and bothering to post it here, I figure you're trying to get somewhere with your methodology, right? At least to validate it, subject it to scrutiny. If your objective is to develop something that other people can rely on and refer to, you should find something to back it up.

​

Please, don't interpret this as an attempt to shut you down. Much on the contrary, I like that you wrote this. I'm all for people writing stuff, thinking about RPG design, &c. but when you write something so, as you put it, other people can benefit it I think it's only responsible to do some proper research and hold it to a higher standard.

Some stuff that's important in contemporary analytic phil religion:

The Miracle of Theism by J.L. Mackie

God, Freedom, and Evil by Alvin Plantinga

God and Other Minds by Alvin Plantinga

The Coherence of Theism by Richard Swinburne

The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne

Can God Be Free? by William Rowe

Perceiving God by William Alston

That's not really accurate... one of the most well-respected, even-handed, and historically sourced resources on the Stonewall Riots is Stonewall by Martin Duberman. You should read it.

Yes, the extent to which the sparking incident and the subsequent riots were (or were not) "trans PoC"-driven is very often misrepresented, particularly today where we get all these things about how Stonewall apparently didn't have any white or cis people (which is total bullshit), but there most certainly were drag queens and trans people (at the time, those two things were strongly conflated) and nonwhite people heavily and frequently involved at Stonewall and in the riots.

Other great resources include Gay New York by George Chauncey and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lilian Faderman about gay male and female, respectively, identity and culture from the late 1800s through the 20th century.

I definitely would recommend everyone here read Stonewall by Duberman, though. It's a good look at just how involved everyone was and in what ways. Conservative, middle-class white gay men, black trans drag queens, working class people, Latino people, white women, etc. Anyone who claims that one group or another "wasn't really involved" is either ignorant or misrepresenting the facts.

There are lot of popular books that venture into these type of topics. I recommend The 10,000 Year Explosion, which is about how civilization and agriculture shaped recent human evolution. It's very interesting, though at the same time it sometimes creeps me out thinking to much about human biology in this way. I might add that they have a chapter on human intelligence which is controversial because of the nature of the topic. Anyway it's a good read, just don't turn into an eugenicist. ;)

I also the often recommended Guns, Germs and Steel on my reading list, which looks on how biology and illness shaped human civilizations.

No. While there may be many things wrong with American society, there is absolutely no valid historical parallel between American society in 1960 and American society in 2011 that would predict the emergence of mass social movements. The causes for the New Left and the sixties were many, and almost none of those causes are shared today:

• Frustration with a culture of political repression (the McCarthy era) and general conformity.
  
• A decade-long economic boom, which allowed, for the first time, a critical mass of Americans to consider issues less directly pertinent to their lives. You don't have much time, energy, or interest in the morality of a war or the ethics of an existing social system when you're barely scraping together enough money to eat.
  
• A pre-existing mass social and political movement which had involved millions of Americans and already laid much of the groundwork for much of the later movements (from the New Left, to the feminist movement, to the gay rights movement), almost all of which had direct connections to the African-American civil rights movement, which exposed people to the systemic violence, widespread poverty, and racial injustice throughout the South.
  
• There was a high level of political capital and engagement. In the 1960s, political campaigns depended almost entirely on a volunteer staff, and were much cheaper to run. More people voted, more people attended places of religious worship on a regular basis, more people were involved in local organizations (from the local bridge club to the PTA to the bowling league). This meant that not only were people aware of what was going on in the world -- it meant that they trusted each other more, and they trusted government more. If you look at the 1960s, people wanted the government to fix problems in their lives; ever since Watergate, trust in government and other Americans has plummeted.
  
• There was a huge expansion in the number of university students. Between 1960 and 1975, the percent of Americans with a bachelor's degree or higher more than doubled. That's not the percentage of people attending college, that's the percentage of the total American population with a college degree, including old people. The number of MAs and PhDs granted per year tripled in that period. Numerous studies have demonstrated that people with a college education tend to be more socially liberal -- the backlash against the repressive and socially conservative society of the 1950s should therefore come as little surprise as this new generation of young Americans entered the workforce.
  
• There was also a huge number of young people. The baby boom that followed World War II had produced a huge cohort of 18-29 year-olds -- the exact group which also tends to be the most liberal.
  
  The current climate is far different.
  
  
• Until 2007, apathy was the primary defining characteristic of the American political climate. Since then, we have seen spurts of outrage or excitement, but there has been nothing akin to the political repression that we saw in the 1950s, nor do we see anything akin to the political engagement of the 1950s and 1960s.
  
• Since the 1970s, the United States economy has been largely stagnant, with a brief surge of prosperity in the 1990s. In 2008, we entered the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
  
• There has been no sustained mass grassroots movement since the 1960s. Attempts have been made -- the feminist movement, the environmentalist movement, the gay rights movement, &c. -- but none of these efforts were able to sustain the requisite commitment on the part of everyday people. Sure, all three of those movements remain as at least recognizable political influences in the United States today, but as insider politicos: people who raise money for candidates, who hire lobbyists, who send out mass e-mails, and who run issue ads. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is most certainly not a parallel to the groundwork and widespread radicalizing social effects of the civil rights movement.
  
• No one votes anymore, no one is politically, socially, or even culturally engaged anymore. Even on college campuses, it's difficult to get people to turn out for events without bribing them with free food. Books have been written on the decline of the American public sphere (see: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community).
  
• There has been little change in the percentage of Americans with a BA since the mid 1980s, and what changes have taken place has been the result of older Americans dying off. Moreover, the United States is an aging society -- hence our problems with funding social security and medicare.
  
  While I certainly agree that much has to change, you make the fundamental errors of assuming that it will change, that it will change rapidly, and that it will change as the result of people waking up and realizing what is going on.
  
  EDIT: wanted to expand some more on what I said.

It's just you. Hobb's Elderlings series was first published in 1995. GRRM's ASOIAF was started in 1991, and there are many accounts/interviews that document GRRM's inspirations and overall vision he planned from the beginning.

GRRM's website FAQ also lists a number of book titles he used for research. I've read some of them, and the specific influences are not hard to pick up on. For example, A Distant Mirror describes a family that grew to importance because they built up their main keep at a major river crossing and controlled all traffic through it, just like House Frey.

Additionally, themes of mental connections with fantasy animals, people riding dragons they are connected to, etc. are all old tropes. An easy example is McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series that was first published in 1967.

EDIT: Also you may want to fix the references to "worgs" in your article; you have them down as "wogs."

It's probably more of a spectrum, and any given person's place on that spectrum shifts over time due to environmental factors, hormones, brain chemistry, and arguably choice (to the extent that choice exists independent of all of those other factors). This was recognized throughout most of human history going back to antiquity, with many first nation tribes recognizing gender fluidity, ancient assyrian cults based around transgenderism, Indian Hirja, transgender poet mystics in Persian Sufism, Greek clergy of Sappho and Cybele, much of the apprenticeship structure of Japanese culture- particularly during the Edo period, tribes of the Madzimbabwe changing their gender as a way of commanding powerful magic linked to creation of life and virility, first nations berdache, mezoamerican guevedoces, Oaxacan muxe. There were transgendered persons through the Parisian courts of love, in the courts of the Venetian doges, and the courts at Lisbon.

Even the U.S. has a more complex history of gender fluidity than most people assume. Our current bivalent view of being either straight or gay, male or female is only as old as the 1930's, and reflects more of a shift towards cultural assimilation that coincided with the mass migration of population away from ethnic centered city neighborhoods to suburban neighborhoods (where extended kin network and local tavern was replaced by local church and high school) that began with the Temperance/Progressive Movements.

Prior to that, there was an extensive and highly visible transgender culture, particularly in larger eastern cities, particularly in NYC, from the 1880's through the 1930's, and views on orientation and gender were much more fluid than what's assumed to be the natural order today. Transgender "faerie" prostitutes were pretty common. Equally common was male patronage of said prostitutes, which was viewed not as "gay", but as normative, even specifically masculine behavior.

George Chauncey wrote a good monograph about it. https://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214

It bears remembering that human beings are more weird and complex than simplistic explanations give them credit for.

I'm traditionally more into literary fiction, but I've been exploring non-fiction recently.

Currently Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Recently Finished: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy

Next on the List: Either Guns Germs and Steel or Devil in the White City. Haven't decided yet

The book list just keeps growing in so many different directions that it's hard to identify which I want to tackle next (I also have a tendency to take meticulous notes while I read and that slows the process down even further!). Some of the topics I intend to read about once I'm done with the books mentioned:

• God: A Human History
  
• Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith
  
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
  
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
  
• Occult America
  
• When Prophecy Fails
  
• Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
  
• Cosmos
  
• Norse Mythology
  
• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel
  
• Misquoting Jesus
  
• On Bullshit
  
• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
  
• Why People Believe Weird Things
  
  Plus a bunch of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, and others. There are way too many. And all the fiction books I want to read too! It's not that I didn't read books before, but my faith transition has sparked an intense desire to study and learn far greater than I ever experienced before.

The Great Game - Peter Hopkirk

Anything else by Hopkirk is also worth reading, but The Great Game focuses on the rivalry between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. It's a long book, but very readable. I read it before the current conflicts and went back and reread it. Amazing how little some things change.

Now I hate to break up the like-fest, but a theist could argue maybe that modern man is not exactly or substantially the same as the species of homo sapiens which inhabited the earth during those hundreds of millenia of which Hitchens speaks. Cochran & Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion (an excellent, relatively new publication garnering high-acclaim) truly provides a lot of evidence for the idea that Man has evolved rapidly since as recent as the advent of agriculture and argues that we're actually quite different from the typical human who lived just 10 centuries ago. So I see no reason to think that homo sapiens couldn't have undergone any subtle alterations, throughout those 98,000 years of miserable "indifference", that could've been important re: the farming revolution(s) and nonetheless significant enough to undermine the sentiment behind this quote. Along similar lines, then, this devil's advocate might object that God perhaps waited until the end of earth's last major ice age before instituting some grand change and fulfilling the divine plan in question.

A number of explanations/rationalizations could plausibly survive definite -- i.e., undeniably compelling -- debunkery; and that'll forever suffice to sanction faith for the majority of religious believers. But the difficulty w/the atheist's logic here, for me, lies w/the apparent imposition of thoroughly anthropomorphic standards upon this alleged, presumably super-ethical deity of Christianity (viz., one which would probably not be held to the same norms of morality and justification as we social humans of fragile civilizations are and always need to be). Ultimately, in this case, if I were Hitch I would've restrained my urge to announce any bold claims about which theoretical notions are indubitably out of doxastic bounds for what's supposed to amount to the entire class of existing rational agents.

Thank you :) If you're looking for some rabbit holes, and if it's not gauche to recommend my own work, I've written at length about a few different aspects of the Apollo program:

Going boldly: Behind the scenes at NASA’s hallowed Mission Control Center

Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained

No, a “checklist error” did not almost derail the first moon landing

45 years after Apollo 13: Ars looks at what went wrong and why

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life

Putting my own writing aside and focusing on real authoritative sources, there's also the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Between that and its companion site, the Apollo Flight Journal, you have a carefully annotated and curated collection of every transmission, photograph, spoken word, and artifact from the entire Apollo program. Warning: you can lose entire weeks of your life here, especially in the high-rez photo galleries (much of the photography was done on 70mm medium format Hasselblad cameras, and the restored and digitized images are astonishingly beautiful and detailed).

If you prefer your space facts in printed form, I very much recommend Woods' How Apollo Flew to the Moon as an excellent one-stop-shop for understanding everything that happened in the Apollo program.

There are two must-have books that completely and totally capture the human adventure that was Apollo. The first is Chaikin's A Man on the Moon, which focuses on the crews and the landings (and was used as the primary source for the excellent HBO mini, [From the Earth to the Moon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(miniseries), which everybody should watch because it's basically "Band of Brothers in space" and has awesome scenes like this). The second is Cox & Murray's Apollo: Race to the Moon, which focuses on Mission Control and the almost unbelievable amount of work that had to happen on the ground to make Apollo happen.

There are lots of other excellent Apollo books, but those two (Chaikin and Cox & Murray) are the two to buy if you want some absolutely mind-blowing reading.

Sorry to saturate you with links, but Apollo is kind of my thing :D

Gander welcomed travelers in to their churches, schools, and homes. Some independent travelers went to Canadian Tire (like a small Wal Mart with more auto stuff) to buy tents and sleeping bags. The store would not take their money.

A friend of mine was the air traffic controller on for that event. He recalls doing a months worth of work in about 4 hours. And then the logistics of handling that many jets at his small airport. They were dragging them out in to farmers fields.

There is a book and documentary on that day:
https://www.amazon.com/Day-World-Came-Town-Newfoundland/dp/0060559713
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gander+newfoundland+9+11

I have spent three 9-11 anniversaries in Gander. It was special. Met people who came back to see people that became friends from that awful day. Really a special place.

It's not about Stonewall, but Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 explores a lot of interesting stuff most people don't know about. I took Chauncey's queer history class at Yale. It was amazing.

As for trans* stuff, I'd recommend a lot of theory. Judith Butler mainly. I'd also recommend Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.

Except yes: https://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465020429/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0/135-3519047-9083569?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QPWTKJN7TEEGM5CF53ZH

Evolution and biology explain the differences much better.

> comparing tests from the 20's to the tests of the 70's as if the testing hasn't changed at all since then

> socioeconomic status improved

So if it's just culture then why did Jews and Italians increase in SES but so many others didn't? Wouldn't they all increase since the environment is shared? Why just them?? Seems like a hole in your narrative.

Believe it or not, up to about the 1990s it was perfectly acceptable to take a woman bowling on a date. There are simply many better entertainment options now.

There's also this phenomenon - https://amzn.com/0743203046

This sounds like the book I just read. I'm pretty sure it is. It's called The day the world came to town. Great read. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0060559713?pc_redir=1410606683&robot_redir=1

absolutely. language is constantly evolving and rules are determined purely by consensus.

I'm particularly interested in a quirk of english where you end a sentence in "that" or "they".

e.g. "trolls... solitary creatures, they"
or
"fucking interesting, that."

no clue what you'd call it but I bet that syntax has an interesting history.

also check out this book. we get a lot of fun quirks of english compared to other germanic language because of the Celts
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer. I'm reading this now and I've really enjoyed it, very clear writing and introductory overviews to cultures all over the world - Europe, North Africa, China, Korea, India, you name it.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman. This one was highly recommended on /r/medievalhistory

There are some great books and articles on this subject. I think that you should avoid the 1950s onwards, because that would be like confirmation for Peterson fans.

For the gay identity that the books that I recommend are:

https://www.amazon.com/Gay-New-York-Culture-1890-1940/dp/0465026214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522048690&sr=8-1&keywords=gay+new+york
https://www.amazon.com/Gay-Berlin-Birthplace-Modern-Identity/product-reviews/0307473139/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
https://www.amazon.com/Homintern-Culture-Liberated-Modern-World/dp/0300218036/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522048869&sr=8-1&keywords=Homintern


A free source that is full of primary sources.
http://rictornorton.co.uk

I was gonna say Lost City of Z. There's The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, which is supposed to be really good. Here's the first page, it definitely got my interest.

The Reluctant Metropolis by William Fulton. Not only does he talk about development and history of Los Angeles, but also how it relates to Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, and Las Vegas.

If you're interested in water and politics of the American west including Los Angeles, I also recommend Cadillac Desert -- pretty relevant in this multiyear drought

>I'm speaking about his tactics

Really? What are they? Because at this point it looks like the tactics are; let Obama supporters make up pleasant fantasies about what they think he should be doing, so they can impose them over the reality of what he clearly is not doing, and in the process distract themselves from noticing their own lack of participation.

These Tea-Baggers are 3rd rate rent a thugs. You are going to tell me that

> the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists

couldn't anticipate this entirely predictable tea-bagger faux outrage, and that they therefore couldn't have gotten the Obama Base active in May in anticipation to completely blanket the media on this issue? Are you kidding me? Given how well this machine worked last year, how is it that everyone involved wasn't sounding alarm bells months ago when the campaign organization was put out to pasture this spring?

You don't suddenly go from being the Harlem Globetrotters to being the Washington Generals, without consciously deciding to do so. eg. It looks like we are being Woodrow Wilsoned.

Enguerrand I, Lord of Coucy

I have been reading "A Distant Mirror" an amazing book about medieval history, and decided to play as , the first royal ancestor of the main character in the book.

To play him the start date has to be January 1, 1077, and choose the County of Amiens in the Kingdom of France.

Me and my friend have had a back and forth succession game as his line and it has been a blast. You are constantly caught in the middle of France exploding into revolutions, the English, Flemish, and HRE, among others, all trying to encroach on your position. It is a constant defensive battle, but very rewarding when you manage to snag an extra county or two.

Theres a very famous book in political circles called 'the party decides.' Basically they analyzed every election before and after and got a feel for who the party wanted to nominate before the primaries and who they actually ended up nominating. They found that the president is always, without exception, picked by the party. So if trump won, that means the establishment didnt throw everything they had at stopping him

https://www.amazon.com/Party-Decides-Presidential-Nominations-American/dp/0226112373

Obviously golden rice isn't purely humanitarian, but pretty close. It's 20 years old, so any patents have expired. There's PR benefits to GMOs, but considering that the vast majority of research into GMO harm has found none (Though I do see secondary effects of GMO's causing harm, such as roundup exposure causing maladies because GMO corn and soy allow roundup to be sprayed). In any case, golden rice isn't roundup resistant; it has vitamin A not otherwise present in the diets of the poor in SE Asia. SE Asian governments like rice production, it stores well and is therefore easy to tax (See generally The Art of Not Being Governed.)

The humanitarian effort line was referring to the difference between your suggestions, which I find admirable and would gladly vote for given the opportunity, and the Marshall Plan which you compared your suggestions to. I wasn't really interested in a tu quoque-off. The Marshall plan happened because of the Cold War. Maybe there's a way to phrase your reforms in a way that advances the National Interest in a way similar to a modern-day Marshall plan.

We have a crop that can be grown and the seed saved and reused by peasant farmers with nutritional deficiencies with little change to their lifestyle. The only thing keeping it from them is a massive campaign that relies on dubious to nonexistent evidence of GMO harm. Your best argument against it without reliance on that evidence (which I note you made no reference to, and I thank you for that), is that it would impair a Marshall Plan-type campaign to eliminate poverty in SE Asia. I find this argument underwhelming. Why not both? First the easy one, yellow rice, then the hard one, eliminating poverty in SE Asia?

Buddy, flyover country views anyone that isn't borderline illiterate as out of touch.

Every demographic out there is just detached from reality, democrats will literally never take them back, ever, they're a lost cause.

https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170

These people run attack ads on people for having a college degree.

The only way you will take flyover country is if you start speaking at a 3rd grade level and pretending to be dumb.

The problem isn't so much the DNC being out of touch as the DNC having fact base policies that appeal to the educated. This shit has been going on for a long time.


>> Edmund Morgan, on the basis of his careful study of slavery in Virginia, sees racism not as "natural" to black-white difference, but something coming out of class scorn, a realistic device for control. "If freemen with disappointed hopes should make common cause with slaves of desperate hope, the results might be worse than anything Bacon had done. The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous black slaves by a screen of racial contempt."

>> There was still another control which became handy as the colonies grew, and which had crucial consequences for the continued rule of the elite throughout American history. Along with the very rich and the very poor, there developed a white middle class of small planters, independent farmers, city artisans, who, given small rewards for joining forces with merchants and planters, would be a solid buffer against black slaves, frontier Indians, and very poor whites. The growing cities generated more skilled workers, and the governments cultivated the support of white mechanics by protecting them from the competition of both slaves and free Negroes.

>> As early as 1686, the council in New York ordered that "noe Negro or Slave be suffered to work on the bridge as a Porter about any goods either imported or Exported from or into this City." In the southern towns too, white craftsmen and traders were protected from Negro competition. In 1764 the South Carolina legislature prohibited Charleston masters from employing Negroes or other slaves as mechanics or in handicraft trades. Middle-class Americans might be invited to join a new elite by attacks against the corruption of the established rich. The New Yorker Cadwallader Golden, in his Address to the Freeholders in 1747, attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others (although he himself was wealthy) and spoke for the honesty and dependability of "the midling rank of mankind" in whom citizens could best trust "our liberty & Property."

>> This was to become a critically important rhetorical device for the rule of the few, who would speak to the many of "our" liberty, "our" property, "our" country.

The "Great Game" period between the Russian and British Empires vying for supremacy in 19th century Central Asia. Really fascinating historical period complete with stories of amateur explorers, pathological fear of Russian encroachment on India, military incursions, domestic, colonial, and foreign politics, eccentric belief in "Empire", chance encounters on the road, psychopath kings and khans, etc. Surprising connections to events today and hammers home the dangers of engaging in Afghan affairs!

Here's the wikipedia for some info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

My favorite book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Struggle-Central-Kodansha/dp/1568360223

Thanks, I'll read the book mentioned in the article. A good starter/companion reader for those interested in water history out here is Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It's older, but it's been revised over the years and is a great place to start.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244

> Those governments and insurgents were supplied and trained by US as a part of the Great Game as the USSR supplied and trained their own groups and governments to advance their interests.

Yeah... I'm interested in the British Empire, especially in India, and read Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, which is mostly about the UK-Russia's proxy war in Afghanistan. It's kind of amazing how little has changed in the area after a century.

My uncle was an air traffic controller in Gander who helped land a lot of those planes. If you're interested, there's a great book he recommended me called When the World Came to Town that covers a lot of interesting stories from the different passengers stranded there.

The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin is the best book on the history of both science and exploration ever written. Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos is the best work on physics for a general audience I've seen lately.

A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman

Words don't do it justice. One of the reviews was "real life Game of Thrones" and while it's somewhat trite, it's also true. The subject is an example of the best of the medieval era, and his life touched on many events that shaped western history.

One warning, it's probably going to be a tough nut for a 15 year old to crack. It's accessible as a narrative, but you should expect to have to wiki things, look at maps, and use supporting material to explain the basics.

For a less intense look, one of the "Life in" books by Joseph Gies and Frances Gies (Life in a Medieval City, LIA Medieval Castle, LIA Medieval Village), is a look at the everyday in that time. Medieval Village is the best one to start with. Rather than the names and dates of "big history", they are the traditions, customs, and anecdotes of everyday life, based on specific examples in specific time periods.

I don't see a 15 year old having trouble going through them. They are written plainly and attempt to explain the backdrop of history that those places are in. Additional material will be minimal beyond wikipedia.

I'm not homeschooling, but I'm certainly going to expose my children to these books when they're old enough.

After reading The Miracle of Theism, I see fanboys that treat a game as if it is successful in its attempts to solve a list of significant philosophical problems; however, I don't need to pull out a thick scholarly tome to point out that it's just a game.

J.L. Mackie has a fantastic work called The Miracle of Theism. Its a popular work to use in philosophy of religion classes.

I don't want to discourage you from reading my fellow redditors' proposals, but consider this: Do yourself a favor and don't try to cram your head full of dates and facts, but rather try to get a look at the bigger picture. After all, humans have been around for a few hundred millennia, and only obsessing on the last couple centuries, and then on minute details, is kind of short-sighted and a sure-fire way of getting frustrated.

Millennium takes a nice look at the last thousand years and does a nice job of boggling your mind at that by taking your eyes off Western history for a change.
Anything by Jared Diamond will help you get an original look at how the cogs of civillizations turn.
The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin is also a fascinating read that highlights mankind's continuing search for new horizons, new knowledge and new conquests.

yes, among other things (selection over past 20k-50k years, larger population size in certain populations over past 10k years leading to more mutations and adaptations, etc.).

I'd highly encourage reading :

http://www.amazon.com/The-000-Year-Explosion-Civilization/dp/0465020429

Cochran was one of the first to hypothesize sapien-neanderthal interbreeding. He touches on several interesting topics in the book.

his blog (WestHunter) is a must read for speculation, comments, etc.

You have no fucking clue what the "research shows." Again, you're a brainless NPC spouting politically convenient gibberish. If only all humans had an equal capacity for high intelligence the world would be a much better place, but that's not how it is.

Where do you get the idea that because the brain is complex it would be less susceptible to mutation as opposed to more susceptible? After all, which would you say has had the greatest impact in the past 100,000 years, our legs, our opposable thumbs, our livers, or our brains? As Harpending and Cochran demonstrated in 'The 10,000 Year Explosion' humans have been under intense evolutionary change in regards to the brain most of all.

Here you go, if you weren't a dogmatic dimwit who wants to believe idealistic lies, you could always start here:

https://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion-Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465020429

There are plenty of people whose careers (mine included) that revolve entirely around western water law, supply, growth, etc. It is pretty cool stuff.

Cadillac Desert is a good book to start learning about some of these issues.

no one has a right to property and in order change that, you're moving away from our most fundamental principles, all men created equal and what not, and moving toward the the imperialistic hierarchies that we fought against. we'd create a california class that would make it even harder for someone to be a part of. when purchasing goods and services, we're all equal. anyone out of state with the money and resources to live here has just as much of a right to do so as you do. i get it, life isn't fair sometimes, but is there a more fair system that doesn't restrict the opportunities and rights of others?

> I have never even had the chance to visit another state so I don't know where I would go.

unless you're native american, the vast majority our ancestors, so most likely yours too, had never been to the U.S. before moving here but they did it without the internet or any of our modern conveniences yet here you are.

> The state has more than enough room to support everyone

room, maybe... but resources? have you looked into our water issues? you might want to check out the book Cadillac Desert. there's indicators that show the potential is maxed out.

> some people may have looked for someone who had a bit more experience writing or negotiating treaties specifically

Fellow liberal here. To help ease some of these concerns I'd point out that most of what an oil CEO does is negotiate with foreign governments for complicated agreements.

Also the oil industry is actually far ahead of other industries in terms of environmental protection in spite of what you might assume. Two books on the subject I highly recommend are The Quest (which is on Bill Gate's reading list and probably one of the single best books I've ever read) and Collapse.

If you're really interested in the evolution of the human brain and how evolution has shaped our psychology, I suggest reading Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works." It's not a light read, but it's incredibly fascinating.

For a more general look at recent human evolution, I enjoyed "The 10,000 Year Explosion." The authors argue that genetic changes have led to higher than average IQs among European Jews.

People who don't like Nate's predictions (because he says their candidate is going to lose) have always liked to attack Nate as wrong and not knowing what he's talking about.

There's a very legitimate track of criticism against Nate this cycle. One that I followed since last August and one that Nate himself ended up confessing was true: How I Acted Like A Pundit And Screwed Up On Donald Trump

Nate's not a political scientist. As a pundit he's no more informed than the average pundit, and way less informed than the (rare) knowledgeable pundit. He and many at 538 screwed up in 2015, because they'd tried to fill the Political Science shaped hole in their data journalism by adopting The Party Decides theory. Which wasn't stupid, this was the most popular theory in Political Science up till this year, just so happens 2016 is the election cycle that pretty much proved The Party Decides theory wrong (or at least no longer applicable in the 21st century). So the 538 lost their fig leaf and the gaps in their knowledge was exposed for everyone to see.

But they're still great at data journalism. They've acknowledged their mistakes, which already puts them ahead of 99% of pundits, and unlike in 2015 now in 2016 they've got actual polls and data to work with so imo they are now delivering truly great stuff very much worth following.

Also, I picked Nate Silver for the attention grabber and ease, but he wasn't the only person doing demographic predictions. Nate Cohn did a lot, to name just one other, with equal success. And the demographic models only got more predictive as they got more actual primary voting data to go on.

Thanks for the info! Linguistics is fascinating to me. Especially since you used the word bastard to describe English, I'm reminded of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter. It's one of my favorite books and it does try to explain why the impact of other languages was seemingly higher on English. It's very entertaining too and not just "...for a linguistics book".

The PBS documentary of Cadillac Desert was very good. But the book on which it was based is fantastic. One of the most interesting, eye-opening, and educational books on any subject I have ever read.

The post was about queer history books. My favorite queer history book is George Chauncey's Gay New York, a fascinating study of the role of urban space in New York's gay community in the first half of the twentieth century. Your response is pretty bewildering and unhinged tbh.

edit: oh, this is an /r/TIA troll, nevermind

For the most part pirates couldn't take advantage of boat yards and the like. They would regularly careen ships (anchor them in shallow water and wait for the tide to go out) so they could defoul the bottoms and re coat them. While most pirate ships would have employed a carpenter for a lot of maintenance such as regular careening the carpenter would be supervising and using the work of the crew. Careening would have taken place more often on a pirate vessel since speed was soo important to them. The carpenter may have had some base pay but usually would have been paid in shares (a portion of the loot). Materials, sails, extra masts, etc would have been stolen off other ships. Since a pirate ship would normally have a lot more crew than a merchant vessel labor was in no short supply. So it probably wouldn't cost a pirate much if anything in actual $$$ but there would have been a huge investment in time/labor. I've been reading a great book on it, Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly https://www.amazon.com/Under-Black-Flag-Romance-Reality/dp/081297722X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465908075&sr=8-1&keywords=Under+the+Black+Flag

Having said that there were shares set aside for ship maintenance. A pirate captain didn't really own his pirate ship the whole crew did, and when not in battle everything was voted on, including who the captain was, so any cost of maintenance that might have occurred would have been a distributed cost.

That story is from page 208 in "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration." It's gobsmacking. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was a physician and a veteran. If he couldn't get a room, imagine what it was like for an ordinary African-American. http://www.amazon.com/The-Warmth-Other-Suns-Migration/dp/0679763880

The Marx-Engels reader is a great book. "On Capital" is a good start. You might try to find reading assignments from university courses (sometimes they're online) and that ought to give you some direction. I do recommend reading essays completely.

I have a subjective non-transferable experience of his existence. Faith is not belief without evidence. That would be arbitrary, like waking up one morning and exclaiming for no reason, "I have faith God exists!" No Christians do this. Their evidence is experiential and it varies.

As for conventional proofs with broader applications, I advocate the KCA alongside follow up argumentation.

You have to be careful what you read out on the interwebs when it comes to critiquing the argument. Most is written by amateur philosophers, as far as proffesional philosophers who've actually READ the work that they are critiquing. Such as, Wes Morriston, J. L. Mackie, Graham Oppy, also discussed by Oppy in. Though, even their published critiques are well, not good. Not going to go into detail atm.

Social networks especially for men have been on steep decline since the 70's. A highly accredited academic wrote about it a while back and he got shit for some reason because he partially blamed multiculturalism. Even if you dismiss the multiculturalism angle which I do his research was very well done and shows a bleak picture of the American social landscape. Charles Murray also wrote about this stuff in Coming Apart.

https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046

https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518974854&sr=1-1&keywords=coming+apart

I will add that the reason men have struggled more with this is because men's groups are exclusive rather then inclusive. Or rather the inclusiveness is based on some metric. I.e we all lift, or we all ride bikes together, or we all enjoy climbing. Female social groups are inclusive. You're welcome here no matter what you do as long as you don't do anything to rock the boat.

Surprisingly both groups are still hierarchical. Female social groups rank hierarchy by the most social person that distributes rewards with equal allocations. Male social groups reward the man that gives out the most the equitable shares.

Explained more simply women give each person in the group an entire pie and the most popular is the one that finds the pie shop. Men work together to make a pie and the leader is the one who carves up the pie and gives it out fairly. I.e. the males that contributed the most ingredients or more involved in preparing the pie get bigger pieces. Men that take the pie all for themselves or give up the pie to others are considered too dominant or too weak.

This goes all the way back to male apes going on hunts while female apes stayed back and waited for meat to be brought to them.

Our modern society is shifted to favor the female schema over the male one and men will suffer until more balance is reached.

2 books I've enjoyed that together give a pretty thorough view of things:

A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts - All the Apollo missions, and a source for the HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon"

Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond - A memoir that's a look at the technical stories and folks supporting the astronauts, starting at our space program's early days.

Both these books are in-depth and not over-dramatized.

If you like that book, I highly recommend Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game. A page-turner history of that spy-vs-spy era.

This looks interesting though I kind of hope this book paid more attention to historical accuracy and nuance than this review of it did.

Another excellent work on early gay culture and the development of a distinctly gay identity in the United States is Chauncey's Gay New York, a fairly serious scholarly review or pre-WWII gay life in NYC.

If you are interested in true pirate history, Under the Black Flag is a splendid book.

Not my area of expertise, but as I understand it, it actually goes back further to the 1890s-1920s which was the period in which homosexuality began to be conceived in opposition to masculinity. In this period, however, gay men were not ostracised as they would be in the post-war era, insofar as they did not threaten heteronormative masculinity.

As I understand it, these norms were very closely tied to penetrative roles. Men acting as penetrators were acceptable in masculine roles. Men who were the penetrated were increasingly feminised and assumed that identity, in part to avoid being in conflict with established norms of masculinity.

Again, not my wheelhouse, but all of this I'm gleaning mostly from a couple of books I read a few years ago. Can recommend Geoffrey Chauncey's Gay New York as a pretty solid history of the emergence of gay identities (plural) which will challenge your understanding of sexual identity on a number of levels and also demonstrate the extent to which our current (though fast evolving) framework of sexuality is a relatively recent one.

I've been reading Jon Peterson's book about the origin of D&D, so I am really curious to see what a modern version of The Ruins of Castle [Greyhawk] looks/plays like. Colville is great at mixing the best (and oft-forgotten) aspects of classic D&D into What The Game Has Become.

I'm also curious about the source material he'd use for a megadungeon like this. If he uses TSR's cheeky Castle Greyhawk book from 1988, I hope the PCs get farther than that damn gas spore that totaled my party when I was 12. (Y'see, the DM described it as a "sphere," but we thought he said "spear...")

It's not bad, but I felt it was too focused on the author's own life story in relation to gaming, and thin on details. Playing at the World is better, but has a lot of build-up about the history of wargaming (going back centuries) and stops around the time of AD&D 1st edition shipping. The author said he wanted to avoid the ugliness that occurred after that (Gygax's exile to the west coast, the Lorraine Williams hire and takeover, general lack of direction) because it's negative, but the 2nd edition era was still an amazing time for creativity even if the head of the company was weird, and I haven't seen a book that chronicles that. I'd love to get a follow-up to PatW that has a similar scholarly tone and covers the highs (The D&D 'fad' era when they were merchandising like crazy, various big releases) and the lows (morale-killings at TSR, the utter failure to be cool with the internet for years, forced Buck Rogers games, eventual near-bankruptcy and sale to WotC). The designers who were important in that era re often still involved in gaming (often in computers) but they're not getting any younger, and I'd love to read their stories now, instead of rumors and 3rd party anecdotes.

its arguable. The basic rule I would advise people is that if you can spell it logically it is latin based. If you can't spell it logically its german. If the verb changes tense in the middle of the word, then its of semetic origin, as all germanic strong verbs are.

If you are curious please see:

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412209131&sr=8-1&keywords=our+glorious+bastard+tongue

The book will actually make you laugh. Well written.

Great read for those interested in a more historical look at the subject. Very well argued and interesting book, very eye opening in terms of the many different aspects of American society and how they developed over the last few hundred years.

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170

He just described America in general. Intellectualism is frowned upon in every facet of life save for other intellectuals.

https://smile.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170?sa-no-redirect=1

• The song of the dodo (if I were to recommend a single book that nobody else would recommend you, it would be this one)
  
• Collapse
  
• Guns, germs and steel
  
• Too big to fail
  
• Freakonomics
  
• Surely you're joking, mr. Feynman
  
• Gödel, Escher, Bach - an eternal golden braid
  
• A walk in the woods
  
• A brief history of time
  
  You will notice the absence of A short history of nearly everything, which is a good book, but frankly it didn't speak very much to me. Bryson is almost only interested in geography.

Thanks for this... have you read "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong"?

Great book that highlights a lot of missing or flat our false information our textbooks are shoving down kids throats. Often in blatant attempts to actually change history or just ineptitude.

Going to give your book a read now. Thanks!

Well anyways, here's a NRx reading list I'm slowly making my way through...

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Introduction

The Dark Enlightenment Defined*
The Dark Enlightenment Explained*
The Path to the Dark Enlightenment*
The Essence of the Dark Enlightenment*
An Introduction to Neoreaction*
Neoreaction for Dummies*

Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell*
The Dark Enlightenment – Nick Land*

The Neoreactionary Canon

The Cathedral Explained*

When Wish Replaces Thought Steven Goldberg *

Three Years of Hate – In Mala Fide***

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The Decline

We are Doomed – John Derbyshire*
America Alone – Mark Steyn*
After America – Mark Steyn*
Death of the West – Pat Buchanan***
The Abolition of Britain – Peter Hitchens

****

Civil Society and Culture

Coming Apart – Charles Murray
Disuniting of America – Arthur Schlesinger
The Quest for Community – Robert Nisbet
Bowling Alone – Robert Putnam
Life at the Bottom – Theodore Dalrymple
Intellectuals and society – Thomas Sowell

****

Western Civilization

Civilization: The West and the Rest – Niall Ferguson
Culture Matters – Samuel Huntington
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization – Ricardo Duchesne

****

Moldbuggery

Mencius Moldbug is one of the more influential neoreactionaries. His blog, Unqualified Reservations, is required reading; if you have not read Moldbug, you do not understand modern politics or modern history. Start here for an overview of major concepts: Moldbuggery Condensed. Introduction to Moldbuggery has the Moldbug reading list. Start with Open Letter series, then simply go from the beginning.*

****

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