A silly sausage
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We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding--"tribes." This tribal connection has …
Suffering the fate that beset its namesake three decades earlier, twenty-first-century Neo-Tokyo lies in ruin. Set off by the bullet …
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe …
Despite being stuck in a frozen status, Akira still poses a threat to Neo-Tokyo and Tetsuo might be the city's …
"Tetsuo, an unstable youth with immense paranormal abilities of his own, has done the unthinkable: he has released Akira and …
This is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's …
In Neo-Tokyo, built on the former site of Tokyo after World War III, two teenagers are targeted by agencies after …
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. …
A game of Murder turns deadly when it ends in a real murder, in the …
The author has a beautiful way with words and at some points, the language was so wonderfully modern, all wry and sardonic and self-aware. But the plotting was awful, with a dozen or so characters not so much introduced but rather vomited onto the page over a couple of paragraphs so I spent half the book going “now which one is this?” For example, there are two characters, a Mr and a Mrs Wilde, and yet while the two are in conversation, the author would refer to one of them as “Wilde”, as in “”Wilde said...”.
This was my first Inspector Alleyn book, but based on this outing, I don’t know if I’ll make the effort with the rest.
Throughout the book, I felt like the author was showing a certain amount of sympathy for the alt-right. It unironically did that thing of describing people like Richard Spencer as being the "dapper" face of fascism. Okay, I thought, maybe I'm just imagining things. It's a good overview of what's happened in the last few years and certainly gives a great insight into a lot of the nastier subcultures.
But then you reach the conclusion and realise -- holy shit, my feeling was totally correct and this lady is fully sympathetic to people like Milo and Richard Spencer. Or maybe she's so completely disappointed with the left, it just seems that way. But she talks about how the left is either incapable of arguing with Milo or chooses not to because they come from the "intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr". But then in the next sentence, talks about David French …
Throughout the book, I felt like the author was showing a certain amount of sympathy for the alt-right. It unironically did that thing of describing people like Richard Spencer as being the "dapper" face of fascism. Okay, I thought, maybe I'm just imagining things. It's a good overview of what's happened in the last few years and certainly gives a great insight into a lot of the nastier subcultures.
But then you reach the conclusion and realise -- holy shit, my feeling was totally correct and this lady is fully sympathetic to people like Milo and Richard Spencer. Or maybe she's so completely disappointed with the left, it just seems that way. But she talks about how the left is either incapable of arguing with Milo or chooses not to because they come from the "intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr". But then in the next sentence, talks about David French criticizing Milo and being "attacked by ... the alt-right attack dogs". She talks about Stavvers and how "the embarrassing and toxic online politics represented by this version of the left, which has been so destructive and inhumane, has made the left a laughing stock for a whole new generation", but (and I'm in serious danger of whataboutism here) doesn't address how the similarly destructive and inhumane behaviour of the alt-right hasn't made them a laughing stock?
Like I said, it's a pretty good overview of where we're at, culturally, and how we got here. I just completely disagree with her conclusions.
