Kavinay
You know how at your most cynical moments, you sometimes think any political decision is ultimately just about maintaining power anyway possible?
You're right.
Bueno de Mesquita and Smith tell you basically what no one who truly believes in any political process (authoritarian or democrat) can tolerate:
1. political goal number 1 is to stay power
2. staying in power is about keeping your coalition of powerful support as small as possible
3. broadening your coalition and other such reforms really don't make a lot of sense if you want to stay in power.
It's harsh but the book is written so well and engagingly that you forget you're taking in a work of hardcore political science. Copious research and case studies went into making what could have been an extremely wonky read feel indeed like a handbook. The chapter's presaging authoritarian tactics with a democratic framework (i.e. ratfucking) are especially chilling and prescient given that they were written well before the rise of the alt-right and global populist/fascist movements.
It's surprising how far back Neiwert starts this book, but it makes sense. Movements built on eliminationism, misogyny and racism have been around for a long time. In this context, Neiwert is able to illustrate that extreme right-wing movements have always helped skew American political discourse and theory towards extremism even as the fringe championing it was publicly denounced.
What you have as a result is more of a historical look at the ingredients that constructed and fueled the rise of the Alt-Right and it makes Neiwert's analysis far more useful and interesting than shallower reads such as Angela Nagle's Kill all Normies. The “this” of the proverbial rant against pro-Trump/Fascist political forces is not just a sudden radicalization or disaffection of the right. Neiwert gives you two big tools: history and analysis of authoritarian psychology to explain the appeal that extermination, hatred of women and fear of minorities will always hold in a country where the right-wing traditionally absorbs such sentiment as almost normative.
This book is terrifying. You can't worry about what you don't count and it's a tradition that Tirman connects through copious research and stats throughout America's wars.
To be glib, it makes you realize how the action movies and news coverage of your youth all tied into a relatively blatant attempt by US political and military policy to dehumanize civilians of other countries and thereby reduce how seriously their deaths were treated by a country that styles itself as a city upon a hill.
Cohen really is a true believer. At least on a small scale, he really does make good case for socialism. Where it breaks down is really anything applied to a larger scale without a dispute mechanism (i.e. markets). I found his objection to market socialism in particular more telling than objectionable as he seems to really want all participants in a socialist system to be true believers too. At that point, I think he's completely lost the plot as we're now dealing with ideologues as the reason why the system works rather than a self-correcting feature of the system itself (i.e. even capitalism would work if it was “true” capitalism and not corrupted by cronyism and regulatory capture, etc.).
Let's be honest, this book is basically gossip. You don't need the first hand accounts of administration lackeys to understand Trump and his government. This administration is fairly transparent about its xenophobic and economic priorities.
There's this point about 2/3rds through Woodward's book where you start to wonder if his key sources really get challenged for being part of the policies of the Trump administration. It never happens. It makes for a strange lack of accountability in a book that subscribes to “a great man” theory as the theme, but with Trump being a grand buffoon. Doesn't this make the story not Trump's lies and stupidity but rather the utter moral failure of the cabinet and hangers-on that enable his rule?
Maybe history will be kinder to Woodward's expose of the inner workings of the White House. To me, Fear seems like a cautionary tale in regards to how access journalism misses the real story of Trump's political fortunes: adjacency to power turned Woodward's sources into craven enablers, not “adults in the room.”
This isn't just a useful book for baseball or sports analytics. Law's approach to making sense of data in the applied field of baseball points out the many flaws and pitfalls of any analytical pursuit. Cases of “managing to the stat” or simply relying on counting stats to the exclusion of useful context are profoundly atavistic, but Law keeps pointing out how these lay approaches persevere and thrive despite more coherent methods.
I generally don't get much out of sports analytics books–they tend to be introductory primers to many of the concepts analytics nerds are already deeply familiar with. Where Smart Baseball excels is that Law does more just than show the advantage of a contextual number over a mere counting stat. Instead, he spends a great deal of a time exploring how the fallacies that went into creating myths like the relevancy of a Save or Pitcher Win were inculcated into fan and even subject matter expert's understanding of the game. It's this constant refrain about the emergence of error in commonsense stats that makes the book an extremely useful polemic against the use of shallow approaches to big data and broader analytics.
If there's a downside to this book, it's that Stallworth's issues with anti-racist activism could really be explored further. Like most works that cover hate groups, there's a lot of false equivalency applied to people working for civil rights because they upset law enforcement sensibilities.
“It was as if Dennis the menace was running a hate group.”
The meat of this story though, Stallworth's infiltration of the KKK, oh my! On one hand, you want to laugh at the buffoonery of David Duke and his co-conspirators. On the other, the terror of the Klan is that they somehow manage to survive and succeed in their terrorism despite their idiocy.
If nothing else, you come out of Black Klansman deeply aware that the powers that be do not take racist hate groups seriously enough. If a lone municipal investigator like Stallworth could comprehensively discombobulate regional Klan activity, why aren't more resources applied to hack such cancerous growth back to the root?
Henry Kissinger writes a birthday limerick, a megalomaniac plays at 4-dimensional patent application, and they're not even the principal criminals detailed in Carreyrou's investigation into Theranos' amazing scam.
Obviously the major takeaway from this book is the vaporware applied to medicine is a chilling novelty of Silicon Valley's questionable moral culture, but I wonder if the most stunning revelation of Carreyrou's research is how Palo Alto seems to nurture world-class psychopathy as a business virtue. Nearly every major player selected in this story is an elite, privileged douchebag. No doubt Elizabeth Holmes is a marquee villain, but so much of this story is about the rank and file weakness of character in pursuit of glory that animates Silicon Valley.
Honestly, this is a bit of a ham-fisted wrap-up to the post-Furman era of IDW's Transformers. D-void is a bit dumb and underwhelming as a climax to this series.
That being said, the execution of this storyline is better than could be expected. Ramondelli's art has its drawbacks in terms of character expression (i.e. the complete oppositie of Milne or Roche), but for an epic scale battle for Cybertron, it works quite well.
The intro and focus on characters that would go on to populate MTMTE as well does quite a bit to reinvigorate Costa's script even if the majority of battle itself is plodding.
“Altrusim and morality have a consumption cost like any other...“
There are two ways to look at Kaplan's work:
1. That this is a cynical work on political game theory that predicts the rise of Trump like figures.
2. That politcal economy, however unseemly, is a fascinating result of the electorate, politicians, media and so on attempting to navigate the fundamental irrational forces at work in democracy.
Ultimately, Kaplan's point is often that markets, both economic and behavioural, trump idealogy in terms of what motivates policies.
This book has already not aged well. On the bright side, Nagle does survey a wide swath of Alt-Right origin stories. But there are two principle problems with the book:
1. It's more prose than research. There isn't really a lot of depth here. If you're already familiar with Cernovich, Jones et al, there's not much more here than what you already know. Moreover, most of Nagle's points about each sub-group contributing to the Alt-Right really doesn't go much further than noting a trend in being transgressive and provocative in same vein as earlier left-wing counterculture. It's a good point and you can see the commonality but there's a void in analysis here that becomes even more problematic later.
2. Nagle's focus on transgressive rhetoric misses much of what's the single most notable characteristic about the Alt-Right, they like to punch down. There's actually a fairly bizarre conclusion to the book where she seems to conclude that Tumblr identity politics has led to a left that's fundamentally unprepared for Alt-Right tactics and argument. It makes no sense. It's like comparing the irritation of a pedant to the gun carrier who just used happily took advantage of the “stand your ground” law. It's actually a really troubling aspect of Nagle's narrative when you consider in defining the Alt-Right as using the Left's old punk skills for attention, she's actually lost the plot in terms of where the power is. A safe spacer, SJW caricature is still not the one advocating for [misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc.] as their cassus belli for actual harm. While she points out the double standard in the Alt-Right generally amounting to whining about how their station in life should be greater, Nagle really doesn't spend any time on how these tactics are not just difficult for the Left but have actually moved the needle on institutional responses to their causes.
To put it plainly, the Alt-Right's mainstreaming is not something this book provides any research or commentary about beyond comparing it to the flaccid rhetoric of the Left.
James Roberts + Alex Milne! Outstanding. Cybertron before the war, the Chaos two-parter, is how you get hooked on the IDW Transformers universe.
Even Mike Costa's Rodimus story is quite good. I think it bears pointing out that little to no human involvement forces the story to be about Cybertronians and that's so much better than anything else in his run.
You get the sense that Mike Costa really didn't have a lot for his Cybertronians to say. That's not a metaphor. Panels are large, dialogue relatively terse and the stories are fairly decompressed compared to where IDW would eventually end up with in Barber and Roberts' writing.
There are a few interesting ideas here: +1 star entirely due to Thundercracker's budding fascination with Earth culture. Ultimately though, this book is probably one of the weakest parts of IDW's run. Anytime humans have drastically more pages of dialogue than Cybertronians, you're more unlikely to get a compelling Transformers story.
I wonder if this would be a better book if it simply ditched the first third of the story. Darth Vader and Thrawn doing a buddy-cop routine in a bar doesn't exactly hit the same notes as The Last Command.
Still, the book picks up from there. Thrawn is less annoying when he's really unaware of how hard he can push Vader. Meanwhile, Vader is most intriguing when he's actually struggling with the identity of “The Jedi.”
You get the sense that Zahn has the essence of a great story and dynamic between the two (three?) principle characters in the book. However it just seems like a lot of the plot that moves us from one scene to another is largely interchangeable. That's okay, but given the chance to fill holes in canon, I'd hoped Zahn would address Cortosis-like details more frequently and deeply.
I really like this book, yet I don't know why. The resurrection of Ironhide is poorly hand-waved away, but this is simply a beautifully illustrated book. Coller's pencils are really clean and cinemati, yet I really think the star of the book is Lafuente's colours. Seriously, this is just an amazingly coloured series. The next time someone laments about the nostalgic days of four colours, give them this book and tell them to shut up.
It's okay, but this story suffers from the same problems of many 80s comics: protagonists need to turn incredibly stupid (allowing themselves to be controlled) to create a plot to solve. It's just a bit cringe-inducing when you consider some of the other stuff IDW pumped out around the same time (i.e. Last Stand of the Wreckers).