Books I read this year
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
I am a Vietnamese millennial who have never experienced a day of the war and moved to the US as a college student. While most people have come to the agreement that the war is over, I have seen myself many ugly scars it left in people's minds. My friend and I would go to a Vietnamese supermarket, and after hearing that my friend was not speaking "hello, how are you" with the South Vietnamese accent (like a refugee), the cashier refused to look at or speak to her. We checked out in silence. We, as millennials, have never decided to invade the South. Our parents didn't either. We didn't fight that war, we didn't endorse that war. We don't have shit to do with it.
The war has ended 40 years yet we felt the pain every once in a while.
Just curious how our experiences differ. I very much think that the Vietnam War isn't as big a factor in people's daily, commercial life anymore.
He definitely would have been quite aware of the Vietnam war, not just as a current event, but as something that he might very well have to either fight in or take active steps to avoid.
Heck, I'm about 5 years younger than him, and even kids my age were quite aware of that possibility. For us, this was something that we had seen on the evening news for as far back as we could remember. We knew people whose older brothers had gone. Our schools had plaques or other memorials to recent graduates who had died there. We had no reason to expect that it would not still be going on in six or seven years when we were draft age.
Irish tensions are resurfacing now too. A sticking point is the Irish/Northern Irish border. The government is being propped up by 10 fanatical, conservative unionist MPs (not the Tory kind) and have literally tanked what could have been significant EU progress.
Now the feeling is that the unions hold disproportionate power over the UK government and that doesn't play well with a fragile good Friday agreement.
Same story with Scotland. Now that NI potentially had single market access plus customs union, which those in power in NI didn't want, Scotland wants this too. Independence referendum was won based on "better together" and yet it seems they are now being dragged out of the EU against their will.
What a mess!
Not very ridiculous. The EU decision making process is a mess, and Germany controls the votes of many "proxy" states.
The main things people get annoyed with in the UK are parts of the single market agreement that we signed up to such as free movement of people and the inability to cut our own independent trade deals but that stuff was there from day one.
That is pretty much a bit of a special case, but I expect there exists a plethora of those special cases. Since Germany and France I believe have the most representatives (since they are the biggest countries) the thinking goes that they have more power than smaller countries such as mine.
The funny thing is that the UK is one of the biggest countries in EU in terms of population and thus have a lot of representatives in the EU parliament.
>Originally proposed by Winston Churchill and drafted mainly by British lawyers, the Convention was based on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ( https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-european-convent... )
The fact the individual countries are mostly sovereign and sign up to agreements is not that appreciated. Many have the idea that we can negotiate with Merkel/the EU and say give us free trade without free movement of people or we won't take your Mercedes and BMWs but they don't have the power to do that sort of deal. The EU trade agreements are what the 27 countries signed up to and they can't just go and change them after the event without getting everyone to sign up to a new agreement.
But it's ironic that Scotland got f'd over by England taking most of its petrol resources and Scotland got pretty much jack for it. So now their balance sheet may not qualify them for joining the EU alone, not dissimilar to how Greece probably wasn't but it wasn't caught in time because they cooked their books and banks looked the other way.
Not before the recent squeeze:
the Barnett formula already allows Scotland to sustain higher levels of per capita public spending relative to the rest of the UK, which is approximately equivalent to its disproportionately high annual contribution of tax revenues to the central UK Treasury from Oil production.
However Scotland's per capita spending growth, relative to the rest of the UK, has in recent years, been nominally reduced by the operation of the Barnett formula, in order to bring public spending levels into line with the UK average, in a phenomenon that had been dubbed the "Barnett Squeeze"
Due to once owning an overwhelming empire, I think a lot of people forget "British culture" is inherently "multicultural". A national British dish is chicken tikka masala, a curry, and nobody can tell if it was invented in India or the UK.
This highlights the ambiguity. There is no single multi-culture - it is an adjective that can apply to many distinct mixed cultures.
Some of the pushback is because some multicultures are better than others.
This photo is particularly striking:
https://i.redditmedia.com/2ZKJnNVW1-Mn41TE8dqXFMten1_L6gBZ7I...
Family eh?
How does it seem that?
I believe you mean that the "unionists hold disproportionate power". Your statement will, however, probably hold true after the next general election...
Productivity, wage growth in the UK is a problem. Is that going to get fixed by carrying on as we are? Should the workers not have more say?
I don't subscribe to the idea that what's best for the corporation and board of directors is what's best for everyone. Thats how we're operating. I think the next general election will change the record i.e what's best for workers, for the average person, for the sick and disabled, is ultimately best for the corporations. After all, a happy, healthy worker is a productive worker.
Data from Wikipedia.
WWWII deaths:
Russia: 20,000,000 to 27,000,000
UK and colonies: 450,900
USA: 419,400
WWII Military dead:
Russia: 8,668,000 to 11,400,00
UK and colonies: 383,700
USA: 407,300
At the time the population of the US was roughly 3X the UK, and the USSR was roughly 1.4X the US.
edit: I wondered, and found that about 25% of US casualties were in the Pacific theater. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualtie...
What terrible goddam war. Anyway, it's not like the Brits hid in a hole while the Americans saved everyone. No snarky comments at imaginary cocktail parties, please.
I thought this was going to be a joke about lend-lease!
Took bad Stalin felt like he needed to match that count during his subsequent extermination of "political enemies."
Or doubled...
1: http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kil...
A great example is the Battle of Kursk. A defining moment when Germany lose as offensive capabilities in the East. It was a decisive win for the USSR, but the casualty numbers are astounding.
German loses - ~54,000 deaths USSR loses - ~180,000 deaths
The USSR's plan was to invade the whole of Europe anyway (Stalin was preparing for it well before Operation Barbarossa started - you can look it up, they had the largest tank division in the world back in the 30s, well above Germany, and with much more powerful tanks that were obviously not going to be used for peaceful purposes).
So presenting them as "allied forces" has always felt amusing to me. They showed their true colors anyway right after Germany's defeat.
"The American delegate is here? Late as usual"
Keep them coming...I love dragging up the old jokes
That part. It was a long time ago.
I know a bunch of British people who've visited the continent, and the only place they could think of to visit was Normandy, Dunkirk or the Somme. Their entire mental framing of Europe is around the wars, and their grandparents or great-grandparents. And the poppies! Always with the poppies.
Insularity is real and many people, possibly a majority, outside the major metro areas are deeply incurious. The wars are the biggest semantic nodes in their heads associated with Europe, followed swiftly by something about bent bananas from Brussels.
Secondly it is a bit insulting to blithely state that anyone from a non-metropolitan area is some sort of country bumpkin thicko.
It's not even ignorance, per se; it's disinterest, combined with prejudice, in the literal sense of judged before the evidence.
The kids going to Ibiza are just visiting a sunny British resort with funny accents. I'd barely consider that abroad, for the amount of cultural adjustment it entails.
Secondly, I wouldn't even say British holiday making habits are especially different to those of other major European nations. If you want to paint a picture of the UK being uniquely backwards and insular then fine, but it doesn't seem to be based on anything outside snobbery and prejudice.
It is easy to claim that people you disagree with have all kinds of moral faults, but in doing so you become what you affect to criticise.
There's a review here: https://overland.org.au/2010/07/non-fiction-review-%E2%80%93...
PS: yes I know, all anecdotal
I think we tend to forget that wars are started by governments, not people. People usually have no hatred for people beyond their borders. Hatred is created through politics and brainwashing.
There's a bunch of recent wars that had virtually no widespread popular support. Vietnam, Iraq, Syria... it does not seem to be a necessary condition anymore for any military action.
The rest of Europe definitely seems to cling to nationalist illusions of some form or another, still.
Edit: I should note, an entire supranational governmental entity/trade alliance was put in place to ensure Europe moves on. It is now called the European Union. After WW2, a lot of effort went into making sure WW3 doesn't start in Europe. We'll see how that goes now that the EU seems to be struggling...
You'd be surprised.
Not only the didn't de-nazify their higher echelons for decades post-war (tons of the establishment, politicians, business and media moguls, etc, being the same pre/war Nazi elite and sympathizers), but they've never leaved that superiority mindset either.
Turkish immigrants have yet to be fully accepted and integrated there, except nominally -- after 50+ years.
The far-right wing party AfD scored a big hit these elections: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/24/german...
And that's the tip of the iceberg. E.g.
"More than 60% of the hate mail came from well-educated Germans, including university professors, according to their study, “The Language of Hostility Towards Jews in the 21st Century,” released earlier this year. Only 3% came from right-wing extremists."
https://forward.com/news/world/188764/german-hate-mail-comes...
There was a UK facist movement, and the Daily Mail newspaper(still going) ran the headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts', the blackshirts were the UK facists. It is a liberal joke to call them the 'Daily Heil' in return for this.
It just goes to demonstrate the absurdity of the idea of a country being good or bad. People are good or bad, not the rocks they stand on.
I don't know how close they were, but Hitler was clearly an admirer of the British Empire, and highly respected them (before the war broke out). He was led to believe that invasion of Poland would not cause France nor England to declare war on Germany (despite the existence of the alliances). Even after the war broke out, there were multiple cases where he tried to negotiate peace with the British Empire, but then Churchill was in power and was dead against the idea.
The scepticism of taking in the refugees is certainly politically "right" but not Nazi-level at all and many people that voted for the AfD party just did that out of protest.
The integration of the Turkish immigrants is another topic entirely; don't forget that mostly the most uneducated, rural people came.
The problems you talk about are different, and they are due to several factors, one of them being the fact that Germany never had a proper immigration law. It all started out of needs and this created differences in how migrants were treated: do you really want to compare the life of a Turkish migrant to the one of a Nigerian or Indian migrant? You simply can't. Because they don't have to follow the same rules. At least not in the past, not sure about nowadays.
Also, as for the integration. Seriously, this is a country that doesn't ask of you anything. Anything at all except that you of course speak a little the language. It offers everyone the same chances equally. Now, the main issue here is that in the past the greatest amount of immigrants were low educated people who didn't actually do anything to help their own kids become someone different, to study etc. The ones who did now are certainly in better positions. The so called 2nd and 3rd generation of migrants.
Regarding the anti-jews part, unfortunately that's something I can hardly understand. I simply don't get these people hating them, educated or not.
The superiority mindset in my opinion is due to the way they work and they are structured. It can often be confused with arrogance, I myself made such mistakes, but I think that this is simply the way many people think. Let's not forget that Germans used to have a highly hierarchical structure. And let's not forget that it's also thanks to that mentality that they were the first in all Europe to recover from the war. All other countries are still suffering from it, while they rolled up their sleeves and worked hard. I assume you are a foreigner like me. I suggest you to make some German friends who are open about this sort of topics, because not all people are, and ask them.
> And is it true that they were the first to recover?
Well, I can say for certain that after WW2 lots of people migrated from their countries to find "wealth", or simply an opportunity, in Germany, so, I'd say that maybe they were not the first, ok, but among the first ones, which says a lot about the country and how determined and good at planning these people used to be already 60-70 years ago. They were the ones who created the brand "made in Germany" without registering it anywhere, which the current generation abuses to make money (by producing in China...yeah). If you like that brand, then you must also understand that it comes with a price - and this is not necessarily openness, being easy, relaxed, laid back, etc.
I think we (nowadays) often make the mistake of underestimating the impact that culture has/had in the progress of a society, which is sad, because it's an important aspect of any society. Denying what and how something happened doesn't falsify it.
The Nazi-similes from brexit politicians is also a clear sign that someone has run out of _good_ arguments. Promise too much, and then when it is obvious that you can not deliver, the other part is Nazis.
Google "democracy Poland".
People have "forgotten" about WW2 because of the terrible threat of the Cold War that ensued leading to half of Europe being under USSR occupation/control.
Still today, both side of the border, if someone attack that friendship either media or politician, they get flamed back into shutting up.
We know what our friendship is worth, but we didn't just have it one day, we built it.
That's why I think Japan attitude to ww2 is misguided.
First and only time I have been subjected to racism as a white european guy. Obviously not in a serious way, but was still interesting as an experience.
Sounds like discrimination based on nationality.
That's not presenting an explanation of how it would not be racism, that's presenting an explanation of the manner in which the racism was formed. And, yes, racism usually forms based on negative experience (either personal or relayed through others, some of which may be intentionally or unintentionally distorting events) of either specific target races or “not-like-me” races generally.
And, it's cyclical, because racism contributes to such experiences in others when it is put into action.
“Racism” is well-established for discrimination by race or ethnicity (the distinction between which is entirely arbitrary, anyway.)
Edit: words and grammar.
This goes against popular opinion, I know, but it has been my experience.
Indeed, just from my experience.
However, I have visited the States once and was very much impressed by how approachable and friendly people are - much more so than anywhere else I have been (border control staff excepted, of course).
I know a few people who say they hate Americans but, when pressed, they usually admit not having much of a reason that's based in any sort of reality. In other words, they have never been there and haven't met that many in real life.
Again, just definitionally; that's not what that word means.
When everything is equally bad, then nothing’s any worse than anything else. I think that second statement is clearly worse than the first and, as an ideology, has implications that are orders of magnitude more awful.
Viewing an identity group as morally inferior (and yours, therefore, as superior) based on what some members of that identity group did in the past does involve a notion of superiority.
On the one hand, this is a very silly debate and I don't know why I'm having it. But on the other, I don't really understand this new impulse to widen the tent doors of racism so that we can definitionally have more of it and maybe if I did understand that I'd have less to disagree about with people on the Left with whom I'm otherwise politically sympatico.
The explanation about it not being racist is simple: this has nothing to do with your race, and more with what your people and army did to them.
Others with the same race as you, but different nationality, wouldn't haven't gotten the same treatment, thus, not racist.
There is, in fact, an ethnic difference between Germans and Poles. On the other hand, you are correct that people often don't describe something as racism if they feel it is justified (or at least excusable) based on history.
It still is racism, and a lot of what is described as racism has similar roots; people are highly selective (and often racist) on which ethnic bigotries they describe as “racism”.
They also don't describe something as racism if it's not based on race.
>It still is racism, and a lot of what is described as racism has similar roots; people are highly selective (and often racist) on which ethnic bigotries they describe as “racism”.
It seems like you fall into the error of describe something as racism if you feel it is not justified and non-excusable, not caring one iota whether it has to do with race or not.
Most ethnic bigotries are totally unrelated to race. And not forgiving some country for bombing yours, or gasing your parents in concentration camps is not an "ethnic bigotry" anyway.
I guess better forgiveness for German aggression are due to good behaviour from post-war Germany, okay education in north and western Europe, and also that Germany behaved _relatively_ good on the western front. Of course it will take longer for eastern Europe mostly due to the extreme ugliness of the eastern front, and the huge economic differences.
Um... yes? I'd be pretty ashamed and disappointed in myself if not. I think I know the difference between the actions of a government versus the beliefs and values held by any particular individual, even if they lived under that government. Not to mention the fact that people are not responsible for the sins of their ancestors.
I was visiting my old neighbors living in the countryside when I came back a couple of years ago. That particular gentleman is a farmer and he has one finger blown off while he was cutting a bomb or something. When I was growing up he has a little pond in front of his house, it's literally called the bomb pond. He has many people in his family killed in a bombing campaign. He told me something like "You're learning from the imperialist USA, I wish you the best. They know many that we don't." So he does hold a certain unfavorable view about the US, but I don't see that he would go as far as being hostile if, say, I take my US friends to him.
I think US-Vietnam war books and documentaries are also popular now because of the parallels to Afghanistan, Iraq, and other traumas today.
Even if you have nothing to do with the war, it may be good for you to understand how horrible it actually was (especially for Vietnamese people). That kind of thing will leave scars for a very, very long time.
Yeah the old pre-civil war government who's main ideological difference was that slavery should be legal. People are just nutcases in general.
I think most Southerners don't reminisce for the "good old plantation days" as much for a sense of identity and a reason to be proud of who they are and respect for their heritage. It's not the Confederacy (per se) that they identify with; it's "being a southerner", and hailing from a specific state (though I suspect few could describe how their state's history is distinct from other southern states any more).
Tradition has long been much bigger in the South than the North. Southerner are less likely to move away from the South than Northerners move from the North. And I think social status is also more important there; honorific titles have long held more sway (e.g. Colonel Sanders), as has the tradition of serving in the military and hailing from a long military lineage.
IMHO, the Confederacy is mostly just a a "high water mark" for southern identity and independent spirit, but not especially meaningful in defining their values today.
Southern Pride is about heritage where both black and white people are fond of their Southern roots. Southern culture is distinctive, containing certain mannerisms, language and traditions, distinct from the rest of the US. Cultural nuances occur regardless of place, though they are more noticeable in the South.
Now is the south racist? Yes, but every person everywhere carries a certain level of racism or a level of prejudice. It is human nature, biological I would argue, a mechanism to protect ourselves. Eastern Europe was noticeably prejudice of anyone they didn't know. I took their distrust based from living under the Iron Curtain for many years. Attempting conversation in their language broke many barriers but not always, which I understood so I went on with my business.
It's "here are some books I really like and maybe you would too" versus "I am a genius, if you enjoy these books you might be a genius too."
More people reading is obviously only a good thing if you believe that reading is a good habit for people to have bc it exposes you to different arguments, opinions and ideas. I do think that reading is a net good. If you don't I'm interested to hear why.
20 years ago Bill Gates was a universally disliked individual... He wasn't yet well versed when it came to managing his image. Being universally disliked comes with problems like lawsuits and other personal threats. I wouldn't be surprised if he has a whole team of people constantly working to manage his public persona.
Makes it hard to believe anything that any celebrity says or does these days.
If this year has shown us anything, it's that reputations can be turned inside out really quickly.
This is not a new issue, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
The Gates Foundation is dedicated to "tactical philanthropy" which maximizes investment "leverage" by allying with existing commercial/political interests whenever possible, often with strings attached. Gates has stated clearly that he prioritizes programs that are revenue neutral -- that generate enough income to sustain themselves. While that's better than a stick in the eye, that's not exactly "giving your money away".
And in terms of atonement, exactly what remedial actions are sufficient to turn a gangster into a saint? Martin Shkreli and Al Capone would like to know.
Maybe you would also donate your billions to charity. Well, good luck earning them in the first place while playing fair.
They are both excellent.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Testing-Mattress...
I can assume it's probably something custom made? I like the way topics are structured, the navigation is clear, nice comment section.
Are there any known tools or service capable of building a full-featured website like this? Any good open source projects? (please no jokes about Wordpress)
If you're interested in the tech behind websites, then I recommend getting the Wappalyzer extension for your browser, It tells you what software is most-likely running on a specific website you're looking at.
He probably also has staff whose job is to find interesting books for him to read.
Then add recommendations from friends and other people.
Had no trouble with the site.
I'm using Firefox 57.
>Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book about the eviction crisis in Milwaukee. Desmond has written a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. He gave me a better sense of what it is like to be poor in this country than anything else I have read.
>Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard. Izzard’s personal story is fascinating: he survived a difficult childhood and worked relentlessly to overcome his lack of natural talent and become an international star. If you’re a huge fan of him like I am, you’ll love this book. His written voice is very similar to his stage voice, and I found myself laughing out loud several times while reading it.
>The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Most of the books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen about the Vietnam War focused on the American perspective. Nguyen’s award-winning novel offers much-needed insight into what it was like to be Vietnamese and caught between both sides. Despite how dark it is, The Sympathizer is a gripping story about a double agent and the trouble he gets himself into.
>Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil. Smil is one of my favorite authors, and this is his masterpiece. He lays out how our need for energy has shaped human history—from the era of donkey-powered mills to today’s quest for renewable energy. It’s not the easiest book to read, but at the end you’ll feel smarter and better informed about how energy innovation alters the course of civilizations.
International star is technically correct since he is known both in the USA and Great-Britain.
But that's the first time ever I heard of him.
Perhaps consider the large-scale consequences of wage-fixing by the tech giants including Microsoft in the early computer industry? Maybe divorcing the compensation workers received totally from the value of the work they were doing (the actual value to the company) and letting annual increases fall so far behind annual efficiency increases had something to do with it?
Around 1980, wages died. Around 1980, computers were introduced to the workplace. Around 1980, average worker productivity stopped going up by 1 or 2% per year but jumped to 10% or 20% a year thanks to those computers. These things are not mere coincidence. To me, they smell a lot like exactly what happened with the rise of industrialized factories that reduced entire families to working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, children included, just to feed themselves. Everyone said 'the machines do the work, they don't deserve any more money.' And they were reduced to starving. And according to any statistic you care to look at, we are headed directly back to that situation.
Interestingly, social mores around sex originally became extremely restrictive during the Industrial Era due to a need to suppress the birth rate of the lower class.... and we are seeing sexual mores become more restrictive by the day now too, though families literally starving as a result of adolescent workers having babies they couldn't afford to feed is thankfully rare.