Just finished World Without End by Ken Follett.

I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.

Currently reading Hillbilly Elegy.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

It's very bad.

I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.

in what way? I am only a couple chapters into it

Vance’s influence has been everywhere this campaign season, shaping our conception of what motivates these voters. And it is already playing a role in how liberals are responding to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, which was accomplished in part by a defection of downscale whites from the Democratic Party. Appalachia overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and Vance has since emerged as one of the media’s favorite Trump explainers. The problem is that he is a flawed guide to this world, and there is a danger that Democrats are learning all the wrong lessons from the election.

Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. “Our religion has changed,” he laments, to a version “heavy on emotional rhetoric” and “light on the kind of social support” that he needed as a child. He also faults “a peculiar crisis of masculinity.” This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently to blame for everything from his mother’s drug addiction to the region’s economic crisis.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

And he isn’t interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did. “Public policy can help,” he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us … it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is—corporate deception—or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

No wonder Peter Thiel, the almost comically evil Silicon Valley libertarian, endorsed the book. (Vance also works for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management.) The question is why so many liberals are doing the same.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

I think the book works as a memoir rather than any kind of larger meditation on the plight of meth-addled hilljacks.

I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.

Its main argument seems to be that Appalachians are poor and uneducated because they haven't pulled themselves up by the bootstraps like the author did, and that it's more or less as simple as that.

I think the book works as a memoir rather than any kind of larger meditation on the plight of meth-addled hilljacks.

Bumping this thread thanks to Hatchet's reminder.

Sci-Fi rec's for beginners. What you guys got?

Bumping this thread thanks to Hatchet's reminder.

Sci-Fi rec's for beginners. What you guys got?

Bumping this thread thanks to Hatchet's reminder.

Sci-Fi rec's for beginners. What you guys got?

Congrats on being better than me, Psycory.

Ah, Lemonparty, the 8th sacrament.

I don't like white rappers.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Went with Altered Carbon. About 30% done and really enjoying it so far. Not the biggest fan of the writing style but the dialogue is "normal" enough to relate to.

There is not a damned thing wrong with people who are bull shitters.

Request:

Any books or personal essays that deal with someone's first time seeing a band. I'm trying to write something, and it's just not coming together, and I'd like to find some models or just get some inspiration. If you know of anything like this, lemme know.

The first time I saw the Descendents . . .

Many that is true, but an incomplete statement.

Perhaps this is old school but I just read And Then There Were None. Knocked it out in something like 100 minutes or so, not a hard read.
Quite entertaining!

Congrats on being better than me, Psycory.

Perhaps this is old school but I just read And Then There Were None. Knocked it out in something like 100 minutes or so, not a hard read.
Quite entertaining!