(Part 2) Best products from r/Foodforthought

I'd probably recommend first Eric Evans book, which nicely hits both sides of my initial comment ( in which he deals with both her need to project toughness as well as her ability to move acceptably away from uncompromising positions), and [Heather Nunn's] (http://www.amazon.ca/Thatcher-Politics-Fantasy-Political-Culture/dp/0853159629), which is a nice retelling of the degree to which gendered politics informed Thatcher's discourse; both in terms of pushing family values from the angle that the ideal woman being a homemaker and in Thatcher's own exceptionalism regarding herself in that context.

In good faith, i think you do have to prove your claim that she was 'warring for the sake of image' without gender concerns playing a factor whatsoever.

Drive by Daniel Pink is also a great book about this topic. It also delves into other aspects of motivation. I really enjoyed the book.

Brain Rules by John Medina is another great book. I love the brain!

It depends on how "traditional" you want to go. China has been around for thousands of years and Chinese traditional medicine, likewise. The answer is that Western culture as a whole has a lot to learn from traditional cultures especially when it comes to indigenous wildlife and their uses and environmental functions. There's an entire field of study about traditional knowledge and it's fascinating.

Of course, what we can learn about medicine from these cultures won't be found in acupuncture or homeopathy most likely. Instead, it would be found by carefully sifting through all the knowledge built up by these cultures about the local wildlife with a specific focus on plants and their uses.

The good news is that these indigenous peoples are usually far more aware of local plants and their uses than scientists who come and visit. The bad news is that they necessarily have to pass their knowledge from generation to generation through stories, songs, legends, dances, myths, rituals, and constant passing of information through instruction. Combine that with a lack of rigorous scientific understanding and you have a terrible disconnect between native peoples and any researchers who come to study them and their environment.

There is huge, hidden value locked away in indigenous societies and it's really easy to forget about because people don't think these cultures have anything important to offer scientifically when they really just don't know how. There's a great book called Ecologies of the Heart by E. N. Anderson. It's truly an eye-opener and has two chapters dedicated to feng-shui (which was originally used to evaluate a plot of land and where to place various buildings and features on it) and Chinese nutritional therapy. For a very long time Asia thought little of surgery (as opposed to Europe which loved cutting people open very early) and focused much more on diet as a means to heal.

Let us go with your argument and see where we reach ...

First, this resolution never gave Israel the right to kick Palestinian from their land. The independence of Israel never meant not giving citizenship status to the original Palestinians living in their land. Actually, [UN resolution 194] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_194) gives them the right to return back. The right that they were never given by Israel at any time since its creation. But you know what, let us assume that those Palestinians who were kicked out "according to UN resolution 181" deserve the suffering and yes it was hard to loose your land and home but this is UN whenever they decide something in New York, everyone should follow it.

You talk about UN resolutions as Israel respect any of them! According to the same UN, Israel should not be in the West Bank [UN resolution 242] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_242) and call it an OCCUPATION. I do not see why resisting an occupation is something questionable. Of course, there are other resolutions that you may like to read, you can look [UN resolution 3236] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_3236).

It is easy to blame each other for things happened in 1947 or 1948. But if we are serious about finding a solution, we need to accept that occupation still exists and all nations on Earth has the right to live freely.

You may never agree with me, but I suggest you read War and Peace in the Middle East: A Concise History which is a book written by an Israeli historian Avi Shlaim who is a professor at Oxford.

I find both parties politically incorrect, however, occupying millions of people on a historical pretext of promised land and killing thousands of civilians every time your government has a political game is not really the way for humanity to advance in the 21st century.

The article touches on the work of economist and tech investor William Janeway, whose work you can read in Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy. I highly recommend the book, but its core thesis can be summarized with some key arguments both intuitive and counterintuitive.

The book essentially argues that innovation is a fundamentally unpredictable activity defined by extreme, and unknowable, risk. There are roughly two categories of risk: in the basic science (i.e. is the technology possible) and in the market (can it be turned into a cost effective and useful product).

To deal with risk of the first kind, we need heavy amounts of public spending on basic science. Janeway argues in his book that the digital revolution was made possible because the bulk of the basic science involved, i.e. establishing the basic viability of computers and networks, was done by public funding (often with the DoD as the only customer).

More counter intuitive is the second argument, that involving market risks, which is that speculation is in fact a necessary evil in developing useful consumer technologies. Again the premise here is that it is impossible to know ahead of time what useful consumer products might come from basic science, how they might be made, who might make them, and when they might become profitable enough to be self sustaining. i.e. there is fundamental waste built into the nature of innovation. For risky tech ventures to get funding, there must be a larger speculative market that is willing to absorb them, including the failures, so that the successes might benefit everyone.

Janeway argues that this is why the first dot com bubble was actually a good thing despite its extreme 'wastefulness' since the investment that went into building infrastructure and the few successes that came from it laid the foundation for the genuinely useful and pervasive digital technologies that we have today. Essentially, there is a upper bound on just how efficient we can be when dealing with unknowable things, and pushing against that limit will only stifle innovation.

I've read Gatto's "Dumbing Us Down", and his writing style for that is a bit sensationalist, too. It was confusing that in this .txt file, near the end, someone wrote that free market, pre-Civil War style schools are "UNavailable only to the
resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich." (Huh?)

If anyone takes anything from this, though - since I'm assuming everyone reading this post has already gone through said schooling system - is to look into homeschooling yourself now. You can still learn things from people in the community and or teach yourself. Sure, we don't have as much free time as schoolchildren anymore, but that doesn't mean we ought to not try. Inside of a school building is not the only designated place where you are allowed to learn, and after you graduate high school/college/trade school, that doesn't mean you have to be "done."

Gatto's writing, along with others (John Holt, Susan Wise Bauer, etc.) have been used by many who have decided to homeschool their children, but you can can become an autodidact and "unschool" yourself, no matter what age.




Edit: If you like the idea of Ben Franklin's self-education, you might find this book to be a really fun read.

I generally love Tom Bissel's writing on games, I think he has a lot of great thoughts and ideas about the industry and the medium as a whole.

If you are at all interested check out his book. I promise I'm not a corporate shill, I just genuinely enjoyed reading it.

> companies ultimately exist to serve their owners (stockholders)

Do they? Says who? We as a society allow companies to have limited liability. Shouldn't we get a social benefit in return?

Even if your narrow view is true, are the practices in this article the best way, much less the only way, to serve shareholders? My clients are often large, institutional investors, with massive holdings in a wide range of companies, including Apple. I would wager that most of them disagree that the practices in this article are clearly in their best interest, especially in the long run.

For an argument against your view, see [this book] (https://www.amazon.com/Shareholder-Value-Myth-Shareholders-Corporations/dp/1605098132).

Whoa, hold up.

>Racism, sexism and misogyny are completely made up fictions, like witchcraft.

Completely is a very strong word, and a straw man. Your interlocutor said "paranoia", which can be achieved in a way that is problematic (and indeed "callous and arbitrary") just as easily with an admixture of truth. And indeed, the way that racism, sexism, and misogyny are often discussed by people who claim to know better is... while not a complete fiction, certainly not a completely accurate representation of reality either. Of course, hewing to reality doesn't make for good clickbait, or cable news ratings, or tenure-track jobs.

>Feminists are as powerful today as the church was in the middle ages.

Again, I don't think you need to be AS powerful as the church was in the middle ages to launch a witch hunt. McCarthy certainly wasn't. Your assertion that feminists are "completely invisible" is fucking hilarious. Romney got crucified (rightly) for his "binders full of women". You simply can't be openly anti-feminist in any sort of open and public context today. And I could point out that Kirsten Gillibrand and other female senators (and male feminists too!) have drafted the VA's law on Military Sexual Trauma that only mentions female victims... which ignores that the majority of MST victims are male. (No, really.) However, I'd say that even bigger than having feminists like Gillibrand and others occupying the exact same office that McCarthy did, is the importance of feminist lobbyists, though this isn't really a hundred percent on your interlocutor's point, since the well-funded infrastructure with political clout usually hails from feminism's second, rather than third wave...which carries its own issues. After all, there was a third wave for a reason.

>Feminism is primarily concerned with persecuting men

Your interlocutor never said ANYTHING about this. At question was whether there are people who are habituated to a certain type of thinking that labels people (that is, both men and women who dare to think differently than they do) callously and irresponsibly. Why would you assume that your interlocutor made the claim that feminism is primarily concerned with persecuting men? Is it? Or are you just habituated to a certain type of argument?

If you're interested in this, I highly recommend reading Sex, Time and Power by Leonard Shlain. It's a very interesting read about how female sexuality helped shape our evolution. I don't necessarily agree with everything he suggests - he seems to theorize that female sexuality was THE driving force that caused us to evolve into humans. I always take those kinds of theories with a grain of salt. I highly doubt there was a singular force that caused us to evolve. Rather it was most likely a combination of several factors. However, it's still interesting to consider the impact that female sexuality had - it isn't something that's brought up often.

(As a side note, there's a chapter that goes WAY into detail about the menstrual cycle. I was reading it while on the train and had just started my period. I had to get off the train and dry heave. Seriously.)

(Another fun side note - the cover features a painting of Eve (naked) with a serpent. I was reading it in an elevator when a mother and her 9 year old son got on. The kid stared at me intensely, and when they were about to get off the elevator he said to me "That looks like a really good book.")

Glad you lliked it. Other good reading:

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West is a 346 page large format book with amazing photos that really deserves to be considered in its entirety -- but key parts of it are available free online.

Mountains Without Handrails is a classic critique of the way Americans think about parks and wilderness -- a book so valuable that the NPS now makes it available free online.

My partner wrote a very similar piece about how unscientifically most people (and many scientists) think about animal intelligence. I also recommend the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? to anyone interested in this topic.

I made a post in /r/Stoicism a while ago when someone asked about books for Epicureanism. I'll just repost it here:

The influences of Epicurus spread through much of the writings of other philosophers and major historical figures. Prominent examples include Isaac Newton, Karl Marx, and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, the pursuit of happiness part from Jefferson's Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was likely heavily influenced by Epicurus.

Anyway, here's some reading material since /r/Epicurus is a barren wasteland where everyone seems to just downvote none stop:

• On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Here's the translation I have. Most of Epicurus' writings have unfortunately not survived. As a result, this remains the best primary resource for those wishing to study Epicureanism.
  
  
• The Art of Happiness by Epicurus and others. This is a collection of Epicurean writings, including Epicurus' fragments. It also includes some of Lucretius' writings from the above work, plus other stuff that you can read in the Amazon description, so keep that in mind when considering buying.
  
  
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt is a narrative of the discovery of the old Lucretius manuscript of The Nature of Things by Poggio, a fifteenth-century Florentine and Roman scholar. Greenblatt analyzes the poem's subsequent impact on the development of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and modern science.
  
  
• The fragments of Epicurus.
  
  And some extra stuff that might be worth checking out:
  
  
• The Essential Epicurus by Epicurus, trans. Eugene O'Connor
  
  
• The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism by James Warren

Neither do I. Every generation has pockets of kids who fit the entitlement-complex stereotype - usually children from egregiously wealthy families that are endowed with an inflated sense of ego. The difference is that with the exponential evolution of technology and normalization of 'reality' type shows, they're right in front of us to witness, and our boredom affords us the unprecedented opportunity to consume them.

George Packer, in his book The Unwinding, makes a point about how there are celebrities in every industry; not only do we continue the tradition of obsessively following movie stars and musicians, but we've expanded the umbrella to include many more - from athletes in the 1970s who became famous for breaking into advertising, to the reality stars of Real World during the 1990s, to now anyone who can amass enough views on YouTube to gain a following. Moreover, we ascribe that status to everyone of importance in mostly any industry thanks to constant, in-depth coverage and social networking. Think about how utterly ridiculous it is that we have celebrity chefs, or how ridiculous it is that Jamie Dimon (Pres/CEO of JP Morgan) assumes celebrity status.

And a side effect of that is that we're all constantly in the spotlight to some extent, through our social networks and our easily available photos plastered across the internet; it's not hard to empathize with older generations becoming infuriated with the ubiquity of the young's trends. That's usually what causes the 'kids these days' narrative to develop: it starts out with something stupid - i.e., accidentally catching, say My Super Sweet 16, and quickly the conversation evolves into how shitty the generation is, evidenced by the fact that this is what they watch (and also, the people in the show are of that generation). Then it goes on to the shoes, and the clothes. Suddenly, it's "and they don't even have jobs like we did! They just stay indoors all day and text!" And all the evidence there to support them is of the public domain, on TV, on Facebook, on Twitter.

Wow thanks. This book looks very interesting.

"for overcoming the self-doubt, nervousness, and lapses of concentration that can keep a player from winning"

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314/ref=tmm_pap_title_0