Beauregard Bottomley
The overlords use the spiritual to control our material well-being through manipulating us by convincing us that they care about us by creating mythological utopian futures.
I already knew Musk was a moron and racist; I did not know Nick Bostrom said racist things until this book told me.
The cult needs a myth that never gets actuated and these super AI make-believers have their fair share of aspirational points-at-infinity to distract us as they try to enslave us with their fantasies. There is an overlap between who they are and the religions of today. Religion is fading and these profits-of-non-sense demand everything while promising only psychic benefits in return.
LLM cannot morph into AGI. The author gave a perfect example of groupthink at the end of the book. When everyone around him said it will happen in 5 years, he felt awkward upsetting the apple cart. That same thing is happening with “AI” right now, all the voices say it will progress to infinity, but reality says differently.
Ray Kurzweil's singularity is fictional and Bostrom is racist and Peter Theil is dangerous and we already know Musk is a liar. Most of the players in this book want immortality for themselves and don't give a damn about me and for them I'll suggest they take their daily doses of mercury and ask themselves how well that worked for Qin Shi Huang.
Niall Ferguson is a twit. Amitav Acharya does not need to waste precious bandwidth demonstrating that fact as he does in this book. It reminds me of the mixed emotions that I had when Bill Nye debated Ken Ham. I enjoyed watching Nye demolish the idiocy of Ham, but in the end, Ham still spouts his non-sense as if he had something worthwhile to say and his brain dead fans get the win by being on the same stage with Nye.
The first 90% of this book gave very little that wasn't already familiar to me. He stated a factoid that surprised me when he said literacy was universal among the Aztec. I looked that up on google and it was way more nuanced than he led me to believe.
The author thinks the model for the world going forward is a Global Peace of Westphalia. Let's ask the Poles how well that worked for them shortly after 1640 or how the Ukrainians feel today.
There are two things that I know for certain: one, you can't read a person or country's mind, and two, the future is unknown. Acharya violates those universal truths as he cookie cutters his brand of world government's control and power dynamics.
There's a monstrous nature of humans the author talks about as he unveils the history. I know this, it's a good history presentation if by the end of the narrative you're disgusted by the actions of humans than the history was told correctly. Acharya makes the reader see the colonial exploitation for the disgusting behavior that it is.
The world order is changing and morphing into unexpected forms. A universal truth: countries and people will always do what they perceive is in their own best interest. Another truism: everything Kissinger ever said about world politics is as wrong as Niall Ferguson and this author seemed to get that truism.
One can just as easily blame religions for the horrors outlined in this book. The author noted how ‘saving souls' was often a motivating factor. I hold all religions that people take too seriously are dangerous. All forms of nationalism be it MAGA or Chinese people saying their right because of their morality not right because of their power (the author had a quote to that effect).
Most of the book was superfluous in as much as it was too familiar. The end of the book was a good read. The author makes a point that the ancient Greeks are Asian more than European, and he's right as far as I'm concerned. He quoted from Said's book “Orientalism” which is a brilliant book when one realizes that Said's main point is that self-appointed experts often never get out of their own epistemological bubble, and that's actually a warning I would give to this author for his conclusions.
Levi-Strauss fails to get from here to there. The negation of the negation doesn't transform the now to the origins of the beginnings of the foundations of the primitive.
The elemental forms never get revealed. The Jungian archetypes aren't universal while Freud's taboos and totems lead to convoluted pseudo-science that is impossible to refute. Levi-Strauss universal foundational elementary structures would often sound like Noam Chomsky's universal grammar and at one time Levi-Strauss notes that what he is doing for kinship structures is what grammarians try to do for grammar. Levi-Strass' structures are a pile of non-refutable hypothesizes stacked such that they aren't really saying anything that we didn't already know and pretends a magic of a groundless grounding with deepities (a Daniel Dennett neologism).
Levi-Strauss asks are societies created by societal norms or are the societal norms needed to support the societies? He says “culture is that which exists to perpetuate itself.” That means tautologically anything that is must have been meant to be and the current culture must be as it is. This book attempts to deconvolve the relevant contributions but never gets that the conclusion is within the premise. This book is asking the wrong question and frames it such that there is only his answer.
It doesn't matter how the author slices the data and mixes and matches non compatible abstract entities to form his preferred story; the story he is telling doesn't reach an objective nor universal nor foundational nor elemental structure.
There's a danger to this author's preferred story telling method. He picks his preferred school of thought: sociology, anthropology, or psychology to fill the gap as he binds his truths. I'm pretty sure at one time he mentioned that when all the tradeable non-family females are no longer available then homosexuality becomes the choice. He also said one of his structures of relationships were based on 3 because 3 is lucky for the Chinese.
In this book Freud was quoted to have said about the incest taboo that it was universally prohibited thus making it universally desirable within the unconscious. Levi-Strauss has a double bind throughout all his descriptive structures while separating ‘bone' from the ‘blood'. There's often a fascist verse Marxist socialist structure Levi-Strauss describes especially when you realize that fascism is about race and Marxism is about class strata. At times this book would often read as if it was resolving the dispute between Right Hegelians and Left Hegelians.
For Levi-Strauss the form doesn't precede matter since there is no substance and his abstract of abstracts does not point back to the resolution of the dialectic. Just in case it wasn't obvious, the first paragraph in this review is a pointing back to Hegel and Levi-Strauss is misusing Hegel.
This book is boring. I liked Durheim's book on religion, and I even liked Freud's book on Taboos and Totems. Maybe because I go in knowing that religion is make-believe while Levi-Strauss is creating a make-believe world supported by what he believes describes the now. Frazer's “Golden Bough” did that same thing. The problem of projecting the now back to the past to impute intentions and meaning is fraught with ambiguities. He can't get here to there without preconceived notions which aren't necessarily true.
I'll warn you. This book has just enough to keep the reader's attention, but bores with details, creates silly narratives, and hovers towards pseudo-science.
Literature and its historical telling excel when it is reflected through a lens beyond the typical. This author smartly adds to our understanding by re-introducing women into the history.
Florida's ignorant governor thinks that it's meaningful when he says “Homer yes, gender studies no” little realizing that multiple perspectives add to our understanding.
“Hector died and then came the Amazons” possibly the last line of the Odyssey in some versions. Cassandra was right while destined to be ignored. Ignorant governors ignore valuable voices while claiming superiority. To feel superior, he shuts out multiple perspectives, and readers of this book get to take one step towards being less ignorant than the governor of Florida.
The author said: “More than a Gadamerian Wirkungsgeschichte that seeks the history of interpretation or effect of biblical texts at particular historical moments, such an approach is part and parcel of a larger project of redescription for the study of religion aimed at demystifying objects of study and treating social phenomena as ordinary human processes. As discussed in the Introduction, we must approach early Christian writings not only as first- and second-century CE Mediterranean artifacts but also as artifacts of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European thought.”
That sentiment sort of seems obvious to me. I did appreciate this book laying out that theme from multiple perspectives, and the footnotes and bibliography were wonderful to read. Clearly an overall well researched book but accessible for those interested in the topic. The Hans Gadamer explication is applicable to all history not just for origins of Christianity.
The author mentioned that Paul of Tarsus got so boring that one of his listeners fell asleep at a window and fell to the ground and died and got resurrected and that five thousand others converted at once and on the spot. Paul needs to learn that it is ‘hard for thee to kick against the prick,” and it makes one wonder how sane people would ever believe in Acts.
There's a fairy tale being developed and passing it off as truth is an amazing process. The author gives a more believable narrative than the traditional approach by considering context, relations, background and historical pararrels. The Bible as more than myth only makes sense when it is assumed to be created out of whole-cloth.
The chapters read as essays and there are connections between the chapters but at times there seemed like dangling threads that weren't stitched together.
This book meanders while preaching against lack-of-focus.
I hate it when I hear old-farts preach against ‘those kids today' and how the old-days were much better. I even hate it more when it's a young person such as this author doing the old-fart routine.
I hope the author finally got to finish “War and Peace.” He's had ten years since this book came out. If he hasn't, that's on him not email, Facebook, or the other distractions he was railing against.
The world distracts us and when it takes us away from what's important the blame belongs with the person who doesn't finish “War and Peace” not the distractions.
The author had longed for a day when he could read a Dorthy Parker book while reading a “New Yorker” commentary of the book while sitting in a street side café. I've got news for him; I could do that exact thing if I wanted to today on my Ipad and with little difficulty.
As an old-fart I can think of absolutely nothing that was better in the past of my youth than it is today. I suspect there are things but they are far and few between.
Two of my favorite books are “Recognitions” and “Third Policeman” and this trilogy ranks close to them. Paul Auster, the character, not the author of the trilogy, understands the ontological difference for what it is and dissects it through these stories. My favorite genre of fiction is post-modern and this book is on my short list for favorite books. BTW, the character Paul Auster understands that Don Quixote is postmodern also.
Note to self: if I reread this book start with the third book, then the second and then read the last book in that order.
Irigaray is trapped within a stifling suffocating world where the self-appointed privileged define all who are not them by the negation of themselves.
The liberation of individual agency and self-identity comes about when the self does not rely on alterity for definition and develops through one's own terms.
Irigaray otherizes homosexuals while justifying the shape of femineity outside the stifling norms foisted by society. She makes the form before essence and speaks of body-without-organ (Deleuze term). She is myopic at times and can't wrap her head around homosexuality not as a choice but an identity.
The author doesn't overturn psychoanalytical perspectives, but uses them to show the absurdity of their conclusions while remaining within their paradigms.
The author ties her hands behind her back and doesn't realize the real argument is beyond the false psychoanalytical dogmas. It reminds me of Christian religious debates. I have no interest in what esoteric religious dogma based on their interpretation of what the bible says. The problem is the Bible has talking snakes and donkeys, world-wide floods, rape of virgins, and worst of all a God who came to earth to sacrifice Himself to Himself for the rules he created to punish those who don't believe. Irigaray traps herself when she argues within the bible of psychology (Freud, Lacan, and Marx). The real argument is that women are definable within their own terms beyond the functional of her period and that the stifling norms inflicted upon them by society was not the way it had to be. Remember, Aristotle said “just look at the slave, that's all he'll ever be.” Similarly, men would say ‘just look at those women, that's all they will ever be.”
This book was an enjoyable read and shows how difficult it was for women to get out of that ideological trap that was foisted upon them in the 1970s.
Fascism requires alterity to thrive. Sexism thrives when women are only objects defined by the subjective whim of men. Irigaray is trapped in the ludicrous paradigms of 1975 and takes the functional realities that explains women and upturns them for their stifling realities.
All psychoanalytical truths of 1975 were nothing more than cocktail party psychological babble. Irigaray is trapped within the world she is thrown into and accepts Lacan, Freud and Marx and shows the reality that their myths imposed onto women through destroying them as individual agents.
Deleuze's book “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” was published 3 years before this book. Irigaray's methodology follows Deleuze. Deleuze undermines psychoanalysis in the process while destroying fascism through staying within the paradigms they were thrown into while Irigaray applies her ire to the stupidity of sexism and the regaining of agency for women and girls.
Both writers make the grievous error of not realizing that the psychological paradigms are nonsense and were the problems themselves. They force themselves into pretzel logic to be heard and try to make fundamental change within the epistemological bubble they were trapped in.
Fascists and sexists need otherness through imaginary constructs such as race and making women only a reflection of what men are not. The absence of the presence (‘penis envy') is as real to them as their certainty of their own superiority. Reality gets trumped by ideological identity for fascists and sexists. Today's MAGA abstracts individuals into otherness and employs ICE onto those who are not them.
The flaw of this book, the author works within the paradigm of her times. The strength of this book, the author works within the paradigm of her times. It cracks me up looking at these kinds of books at how much idiocy was believed to subject others through alterity.
There are ‘things hidden since the foundation of the world' which start to reveal themselves through books such as this one. It took the Christian mythologists to ignore beliefs in their cult and myths and made them real miracles and it takes Walter F. Otto in 1933 to provide a foundation for how the Greeks (and Romans) saw themselves before they became pagans through Western Christianity's eyes.
Dionysus is as important to the Greeks (and Romans) as any of the Gods. Nietzsche resurrects Him and His wild abandonment in the “The Twilight of the Gods,” and Otto notes that and explains why He is so critical for understanding the Greek pantheon of Gods.
Rene Girard (a Christian) wrote a book in 1974 called “Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World,” and sneaks in the relevance of Dionysius and connects him to Freud. Otto's book does too. Catholics have Mary, the cult of Dionysius has there special appeal to women also.
This book illustrates the importance of Dionysius for the Greeks and assumes his readers are willing to understand what that means through its own paradigms. He doesn't connect Him to Christianity but the echoes within this book aren't hard to notice.
There's no overall overriding foundation of truth that determines fairness with objective standards and historians don't have a monopoly on that and ‘character' is as relevant as a pretty face for telling history. The author loves character as a certainty and makes history like a science when it is fluid and dependent on the lens looking at the sea of facts with the malleable narrative that is put upon it.
At times, I enjoyed the author's connections to Heisenberg, Picasso, philosophy of science and so on, but he lived in a pretend world with pretend rules and his pretending that self-identity was as constructed as Foucault and Derrida claim was off-putting. The author claims certainty while denying certainty.
History reveals itself most subtlety when we get a chance to look back at a historian as they were presenting what they thought was history. This book was published in 2013 and the angst, fear, confusion, and Evangelical mischief presented by the author tells the present-day reader (2025) as much about that time as the history the author was telling. Edward Gibbon's “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” is a great book not so much for the history he tells which he often gets flat out wrong, but because he tells the present-day reader of the foibles, arrogance, and false-superiority of the Englishman of 1776.
The author lets Christianity Today define what evangelicalism purports to be. Evangelicalism never knows itself and at times wins the debate by declaring that the other side aren't true evangelicals. Christians, Republicans, and evangelicals simply divide by alterity and neuter their opponent by appealing to a purity test that includes them while excluding the other.
The evangelicals redefine themselves while excluding the other. The definition of who they are is not as important as the myth they create about themselves. The author mentioned that Oswald Spengler created his own morphological history while fitting his narrative that defended his Germanic Fascist myth. Worthen debits David Barton, a pseudo-American historian accepted by the rightwing and evangelicals for creating the same kind of non-sense regarding American history and the founding fathers, and Worthen notes that the narrative being falsely spread is more important than the truth since the meaning and purpose is salvation not truth.
The author notes that she focuses on white evangelicals and their worldview(s). They demand a worldview and argue that anyone without their presuppositional Christian starting point can't possibly be right about anything. Their truth must be the only truth. Evangelicals can also have experiential truths from the Holy Spirit determining their feelings thus negating any refutation from rational, reasonable, or logical perspectives. There was a third set of evangelicals and they are dwindling and they respect reason as a pathway to religion while seeing the world in two magisterial as Stephen Jay Gould did.
The reason this book is so intriguing to me is that it would not have been obvious to me from this book that white evangelicals would have overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2024. The author missed what was happening as she was writing and that is the theology didn't matter to them as much as the politics of division. Humans, their wellbeing, and soteriology gets sublimated by the authority of the religiosity pretended by 80% of the white evangelicals. It's the MAGA they want not the theology.
The divisions the author documents are quaint to read about, the real crisis of authority for white evangelicals comes about through their embrace of dehumanizing those who don't pass their purity test as it is filtered through their very own Holy Spirit decoder ring. When it comes to dehumanizing the other, American evangelicals are not fiercely independent, they are in sync with their fellow believers as long as they can actualize their hate. There is no paradox with their beliefs and their individuality. As mentioned in this book, the evangelicals started to control their intellectual truths through fiat and provided a compelling make-believe narrative to explain away their history through believing their changing myths while updating them on a as needed basis. The political trumps the theological and the current events of today show where the evangelicals were heading.
Overall childish outbursts of incoherence peppered with Burning Man irrelevances with cyberpunk sensibilities through a fictional re-imagining of Deleuze and Guattari as if they really made sense in a non-sensical world.
Deleuze and Guattari are my favorite authors since I realize they never take themselves seriously as they playfully chase the rabbit down the hole looking for that one pill that makes you taller and the other pill that makes you smaller. To fully appreciate them one must not take them seriously. Land takes them seriously and makes them more serious.
Land is trapped in nonsense while taking himself seriously. Land double-binds himself by making the self non-existent and the world all that there is in his Kant critiques of the critiques (probably the only reasonable essays in this book of essays were the Kant essays and even then, they were written by somebody who was out of their own depth).
The Heidegger essay on Heidegger understanding of poetry is always laughable, by the time Heidegger mumbles that language knowing itself as language becomes narcissistic Heidegger goes into his mysticism and shows his why bother phase. I enjoy my Heidegger and have read scores of his books, but by 1957 he is longing for the good old days of Nazism and just can't help himself as he wades into irrelevancy. Land unsuccessfully tries to bring that irrelevancy back.
The full abortion for this book starts during the cyberpunk phase of the book and his mathematical nonsense spread unevenly in those essays. He mostly rambles without purpose while pretending to understand. I did like ‘transcendental miserabilists' as a slur, but I realized that he's referring to people like me.
I think a good drug induced weekend at the Burning Man festival would be more edifying than these series of essays would provide. Read Deleuze and Guattari on your own, or read Kant's critiques, read Heidegger but stop reading him when he pretends to understand poetry as being, and never waste your time reading cyberpunk, I have.
MAGA loves to hate communist while both claim certainty through their own myths as truths. Marx and MAGA embrace alterity while privileging their perspective. Marx's essay on ‘what is a Jew' could be written by MAGA or Jordan Peterson by changing the word Jew to transgender person or Mexican. The dehumanizing of the individual through making them other (alterity) is common in these essays and within MAGA.
Post-modernists know there is no overriding central authority determining truth or fairness. Marx and MAGA pretend they have the ultimate truth and use that as weapons against reason, rationality, and fairness. They both are anti-humanist while claiming the opposite by dividing us by petty differences. The Nazi's saw the world through race, Marx through class and both claimed their myths were truth, but in the end they distract from the oligarchs' real goal of domination since there is no central overriding authority that determines truth or fairness.
Science doubts so that it can grow. The possible landscapes of possibilities for creation get muddled by false certainties. I've been searching for a book that realistically highlights our current state of understanding the universe(s) origin before the big bang.
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and gravitational waves are inspiring new ways to think about the beginning of everything and with testable hypotheses.
The authors made Occam's Razor “only the simplest model that fits the data will survive.” Their motive for writing this book was “to give a glimpse of science at the edge of the knowledge, past the cutoff; to show that it involves not just theoretical conjectures, equations, and experiments, but is also a human process, full of conflict and emotion: bitterness, hope, doubt, and belief. But another motive for the book was to show readers that the public have been misled. Controversies supposedly resolved by modern cosmology are very much alive. The Big Bang does not prove that the universe had a beginning, and dark energy does not rule out cyclic behavior.”
The authors succeeded in their intentions. This book was necessary for me to get up to speed in a coherent way.
The best of the AI books I've read so far.
Hao writes the first draft of history and it ain't pretty. The monsters are devouring us as our gatekeepers enable them.
The myth of genius contributes to the fake-world the monsters claim to be building. Exploitation and alienation are features not bugs in the demon haunted world created by the masters of the universe. They induce fear out of whole cloth and offer solutions for their imaginary fears.
Hao writes an outstanding book warning us against the madmen who are running the asylum, while we who inhabit the asylum are distracted.
Fitting, the last line of the book, “this book is explicitly prohibited from being used by AI.”
The book is a treat and I never really wanted it to end. The old fart vibes never stopped.
The Party of Disappointed People have a spiritual leader with Burton.
Those Papist with their superstitions need to reject their idols and embrace a different set of myths. Burton has the truth and all others are fools who don't avoid idleness and excess.
Any serious embracing of this book would be suspect. Burton's conservative, old-fart views fit today's madmen. The devil is real and causes us to stray from perfection and Jesus is the light, the truth and the way and Papist (Catholics) aren't true Christians after all. The other is to be feared since they aren't us.
Burton makes our lives surrounded by disappointment and we feel better when we accept that and embrace his interpretations of the world by outsourcing our truths to his preferred myths.
The author sees women according to their breasts, bosoms, or curvature. Ex-nuns for the author want sexual satisfaction up to a limit.
Dull and always deadly serious with fabricated ramifications resulting from fan fiction written by James, brother of Jesus.
The author has no concept how Christians would react to fan fiction even if it was written in 65 AD.
Do people really believe in this kind of poorly reasoned rubbish? I wonder. Edmundson pretends Freud's judgmental persistent superego voice within us replaces Nietzsche's death of god and the transference from the patient to therapist enables the recovering of unconscious hidden truths from archetypal Jungian forms through Freudian/Lacanian/Jungian psychoanalysis. Edmundson also believes the modern creation of the woke mob is the result from the unleashing of the collective unconsciousness that other wise would lay dormant, and that the best solution is for the individual to sublimate their own id to the ego of the traditional Burkean truth since the kind of “authority that Burke praises seems to be passing from the world.” (that's an actual quote from this book).
Edmundson had some convoluted anti-woke stuff about Christ, religion, God, black people, hip music and explaining the proper use of language through his white-male-person-explaining.
Edmundson is taking psychoanalytical babble from the 1910s through the 1970s and badly applying it to today's world and internet mobs. I get the feeling that Edmundson is a never Trumper republican by the way he ignores the empathy part of wokeness and blames MAGA on Trump. He'd say that Hitler created Nazi Germany and led them astray, and that he had a Svengali sway over the masses. I would say that the masses were looking for their savior and were corrupt before Hitler tapped into their hate. Trump had a willing mob before he took control.
I'm insulted by the lack of intelligence that was demonstrated in this book. The author gave special mention to Richard Rorty. Rorty makes our beliefs relative to the vocabulary of the moment and allows for no defense against a demagogue coming along and creating an alternative universe such that all news that doesn't support the special authority (the one Edmundson wants us to sublimate ourselves to) must be fake news and swallowed by the demagogic authority (read “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” for amplification).
The book doesn't fully cohere at times and parts of it seemed as if they were essays written elsewhere for a different purpose. At the core this book is bad Freud/Jung/Lacan psychology mumbo-jumbo applied to psychoanalyze modern internet trends. I'll keep my purloined letters in plain sight and see who notices!
The elucidation within the footnotes presented in this book are as interesting as the B&T text itself. I knew that others who had read B&T saw it differently from me and would extrapolate interpretations that weren't obvious to me from the text itself, that's because I had not read these footnotes.
Heidegger settles scores at least against existentialists and changes the nature of Dasein itself as he re-evaluates what he said from what he claims an author leaves unsaid as they write. That's a good thing, but the nature of the text gets re-interpreted through remembrance-in the event. That reminds me, Heidegger's turn from Nietzsche is apparent within some of these footnotes.
Within B&T itself it's easy to see the Nazi weird-view of Heidegger and within this book of his footnotes Heidegger cites that it is the Volk and race that makes the ‘authentic self' giving Dasein the essence of the projection of the care. His naziness is on display.
I always make a comment on how Heidegger was really and truly an unrepentant Nazi, because despite that I still love reading his writings since there is a depth to his writings that provides a ground for a groundless world. Not only did Heidegger redefine Dasein such that it had to be ‘man' with his commentaries from this book, he also took away the grounding he thought he provided with the essence for Being. In B&T, Dasein could have been anything that takes a stand on its own understanding, within these commentaries he makes Dasein man.
This book of footnotes reads easier than B&T and all the main concepts pop-up within the footnotes. Heidegger is difficult reading but these footnotes weren't. When he talks about poetry and art and connects that back to Being, he seems full-of-shit to me, all but that final section was worth reading.
After the first time I read B&T, I would see comments from other writers about ‘the clearing', or ‘Aletheia' or Dasein is man, or being is groundless, and was dumbfounded because it was just an itty-bitty part of the book or the concepts had not been fleshed out in B&T. Now, I know what happened. Those commentators had read these footnotes or Heidegger's later works and took Heidegger differently from what was originally presented within B&T.
This series of footnotes flows as an easily digestible book, and the esoteric jargon that Heidegger uses makes more sense than it did in B&T.
