like this tweet if the answer is Godel Escher Bach

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) February 10, 2020

None. I don’t care what anyone thinks of what I read. Have read far too many books for that. GEB, though, is a book that I despise. It’s probably pretty good for eight-year-olds. That’s about the complexity level it’s at. It’s so widely loved because it makes stupid people feel smart without imparting much or demanding much.

GEB is definitely my most loathed book, and one of the few that I’m sad I completed. But in a way it was a good thing. I read that and then resolved to stop reading bad books as soon as I felt like doing so. Since that time I’ve abandoned hundreds upon hundreds of subpar books. In the end, the dreadful GEB saved me much time.

It’s weird that the white working class gets blamed for every ill, but voting turnout from the working class is very low, comparatively. And because of the general lack of wealth they of course have very little (almost no) political influence.

It was not white working class voters who were responsible for Trump, though they to be fair did vote for him in high numbers. Instead, what caused Trump was a long destruction of all of society by neoliberals and laissez-faire worshippers, all enabled by Third Way Democrats like Clinton and Obama.

But dopey little centrists want to blame the white working class for everything as a convenient scapegoat for their own massive failures.

Why People Don’t Learn: You Can’t Look It Up And You Can’t Give It Away.

I try to tell people this but it just sounds arrogant. These days, though, I am too old to care how it sounds. To think like I do and to know what I know, you have to read at least 10,000 books or book equivalents. I suspect that’s probably the bare minimum if you’re already naturally very smart; most people will require far more.

Truly I have no idea how many books I’ve read in my life, or words. Probably 20,000 books or so if I had to guess. Could be as many as 30,000. For many years I read a few books a day nearly every day. My record was when I was 13 and I read seven books in a single 24-hour period. I was going for eight but I fell asleep. Typically I’d read 20-25 books in a week and I did this for roughly 12 years. My pace decreased after that and then I started reading more online, but I try to stay away from garbage (mostly), so I still think that is mostly valuable reading.

This is the only way to be able to think as broadly and as quickly as I generally do. I followed this path mostly by accident but it’s the only way to not be a dunce.

Humans have inferior hardware, so it takes a lot to get it to work reasonably well. The above is one way to do so.

I'm a sucker for cheesy Shyamalan movies like Lady in the Water. I just really really like fairy tales. Oh and I really liked Ender's Game. https://t.co/gTCtmhiQNc

— Yael Grauer (@yaelwrites) February 9, 2020

I liked Lady in the Water, too. It was an exercise in Lynchian surrealism applied to a modern fairy tale. It was not supposed to make sense and it did not. It’s about archetypes and playing with them on the background of the mundanity of life and what it means to have a purpose within that quotidian banality.

I’m a sucker for a story about stories, and Lady in the Water is one because of course there is literally a character called “Story” in the story. The plot is essentially that the stories we tell are the plots that matter, and that there is nothing else.

That is why most people did not like it, and that’s why I did.

Took longer than I hoped, but done is done:

✅ do 1000 pullups (over 13 months) pic.twitter.com/qfDnr3TwAZ

— Visa ✈️ NYC! 🗽 (Apr23-May12) (@visakanv) January 27, 2020

I have done approximately 2500 pull-ups over the last 13 months, and that was nowhere near maximum effort. (Not an exercise I particularly concentrate on. And not to take anything away from Visa. That’s still a lot of goddamn pullups. I just work out tons.)

Hey, another one of those things dipshits told me would “never happen” happening:

Starting in April, Chrome will start blocking files downloaded insecurely from HTTPS pages! Read the details here: https://t.co/pjkF4mhgEt (1/4)

— Joe DeBlasio (@deblasioj) February 6, 2020

Next step is that they’ll block all non-HTTPS sites altogether. I guarantee that will occur.

an erotic current runs beneath the surface of every intimate conversation, regardless of gender and regardless of sexual orientation pic.twitter.com/XJLmmyDjfl

— Ava (@noampomsky) January 8, 2020

This is a component of what I am talking about when I discuss the new prudishness that’s developed over the last few decades. Some of the most prudish are millennials and younger, strangely. Or perhaps not so strangely. Prudishness to be clear doesn’t mean fear of being seen naked or aversion to viewing the nude — no, this is only a minor and not-always-present exterior symptom that discloses something much deeper.

That erotic current speaks to lack of control, that one might do something that’s not fully cogitated upon and reasoned out. People used to welcome those experiences, seek them out, to crave them and put themselves in situations where they were more likely to occur. Now, less than ever, they do not.

Why the shift? I think there are a few reasons. The rise of helicopter parenting is one of them. Prudishness is a self-protection mechanism to avoid disclosure. But overarching all of that is the entire surveillance society we’ve built to contain and constrain non-neoliberal impulses and methods of expression.

Thus, the modern prude, alone and lonely because no erotic current can be created, is merely enforcing in her- or himself the strictures that this always-suspected and often-present surveillance demands of the subject. That is, to be always ready to work, to do nothing that is not rational, to not go off script and do something ill-advised or unpredictable.

The modern prude, then, is the subject that neoliberalism has made.

NASA Moves Forward With International Space Station ‘Hotel.’

*checks price*

Ok, I am waiting for the Space Motel 6.

The crisis of supply chains has been obvious to many of us for years. It’s why neoliberals who made us so vulnerable drive us crazy. Especially when they mock Trump’s instincts on trade when they were the lunatics!

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 9, 2020

Yes. Trump’s instincts on trade were and are correct. His execution is terrible. But at least he does understand it’s absolutely insane for a country as large as the US to outsource all manufacturing to other countries. It’s suicidal economically and politically.

Even saying that, to the neoliberals, is racism. But destroying your own manufacturing base and impoverishing 20% or more of your population in the process is far worse than that fake “racism.”

Every time anyone says anything about Obama’s massive inaction and his terrible administration, the centrists crawl out of the woodwork, screaming about two things: the first dispirited yap is that he was somehow stymied by Congress. The second asseveration is that the president is a helpless little baby, with no power at all, who just can’t do anything. Heck, he barely has more power than an intern at a car wash company!

The first claim is absurd because most of the items that I and others cared about could’ve been enacted by executive order, just as Trump has done, and Congress did not need to be involved at all. Obama was not stymied by Congress. He was stymied by his own bad tendencies and incompetence.

The second claim is laughable because obviously Trump has wielded a great deal of power, and made enormous changes across all levels of government while signing hardly any significant legislation. Thus, the idea that the president is an impotent little tiny baby lacking in influence of any kind is utterly disproven by lived reality.

This won’t convince any centrists, I know. But I still like baiting them if I can. Or at least ranting into the void.