I love science fiction, but I’ve been branching out more into fantasy, mystery, and even some romance. It’s always fun to explore unfamiliar genres!
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Success! Daniel Strokis has read 15 of 12 books.
A copy of this very old, very odd (to me anyway) book was given to me by the father of a friend when he was visiting from India. I don’t know why he liked this book enough to recommend it as it seems fairly condescending towards Indian culture, but I thought I’d give it a read because how often are you recommended books that over a century old?
For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for …
Wicked is a revisionist exploration of the characters and setting of the 1900 novel The …
I went down a rabbit hole and found out that there’s a LOT more lore about Oz than I had ever imagined. It got me curious enough, and I saw the movie recently, so I thought I’d check it out. I’ve enjoyed the first few chapters so far!
Once a culturally rich world, the planet Aka has been utterly transformed by technology. Records of the past have been …
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, …
Patrick Bateman is handsome, well educated, intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the …
Patrick Bateman is handsome, well educated, intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning …
Content warning Discussion of the ending
This is a profoundly disturbing book. The horrific acts, written in such detail, are difficult to read; purposefully shocking in their depravity and the blasé style in which the protagonist describes them.
Taking into account the time in which this book was written, and the fact that it’s often held up as “the” example of transgressive fiction, I think the commentary on American life still has value over 30 years later.
The extreme differences between Bateman’s crimes and his everyday existence do, I think, work to illustrate the hollowing out of people living under neoliberal capitalism. The transactional nature of every interaction, the hyper-focus by characters on material things, and his extreme selfishness are all heightened examples of “greed is good”.
I think there’s also an argument to be made that Bateman is actually a loser. If you take the side that he didn’t actually commit these crimes (no bodies are ever found, he suffers severe psychosis at various points), then it’s possible to view his persona as being a fantasy he creates to feel powerful. Outwardly, no one recognizes him, and several times tell him to his face that Bateman is a loser (mistaking him for someone else). This is something I think we see in the radicalization of young men today; fantasizing about the power to inflict extreme violence on perceived enemies or people they see as lesser than themselves. The failure of many people to see the book as an example of how this point of view destroys the soul is the great failure of this book. I would say that this story suffers from the same problem as Fight Club: too many people took away the wrong message.
Daniel Strokis
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Practicing New Worlds explores how principles of emergence, adaptation, iteration, resilience, transformation, interdependence, decentralization and …
AK Press has made 6 e-books free to download for a limited period: www.akpress.org/featured-products/featured-topic-free-ebook.html
- Practicing New Worlds - Abolition and Emergent Strategies
- Street Rebellion - Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence
- No Pasarán! - Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis
- The Operating System - An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State
- Joyful Militancy - Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times
- Emergent Strategy - Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
@LALegault@newsie.social @Lazarou@mastodon.social This shock doctrine is exactly what I’m worried about in the near future of the US economy (see Musk’s comments about necessary hardship).
Daniel Strokis
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@talzag Same result in the USSR?Russia - introduced kleptocracy and corruption.
Daniel Strokis
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An introduction to "disaster capitalism" argues that the global free market has exploited crises, violence, …
“Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world—out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116th, making it the 8th most unequal country on the list.52 If that track record qualifies Chile as a miracle for Chicago school economists, perhaps shock treatment was never really about jolting the economy into health. Perhaps it was meant to do exactly what it did—hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence.”
In 2005, the editors of Metro Silicon Valley, San Jose’s alternative weekly newspaper, offered Gary …
This collection of articles if full of so many gems. I had no idea just how influential the Bay Area, and in particular the South Bay, has had on the world. That’s not the point of this collection, but it’s apparent when you read about who grew up here, or studied here, or lived here, and were influenced by this place.
A shadow has fallen over the megachurch in Ogun State, Nigeria: the beloved Bishop Dawodu has been arrested for the …
