I reread that a while back after reading it in high school and it still holds up.
The Kennedy Chronicles: The Golden Age of MTV Through Rose-Colored Glasses
The style of the book isnât that good. She writes like someone whoâs trying to write an edgy memoir. So there are lot of immediate call backs, line after line of them. She also does the a-lot-of-run-on adjective and adverb phrases.
A good memoir shows growth even if what youâre covering isnât super deep, but the memoir is just a series of events and then she gets fired. The end.
The good parts though the events dealing with bands in the 90âs like Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Soundgarden, Dave Navarro and what was especially good were the follow up interviews she did with them years later about events that happened in the memoir.
Overall I wouldnât recommend though.
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A World after Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right
The book goes over the lives and ideas of 5 people, who like title says, inspired the Radical Right. The book is relatively short at 250 pages, so each person gets around 30 pages. It hits that perfect length where you can read about 1 person and take a break. Itâs good to because it hits how they contribute to the radical right, but gives more contours to their thoughts.
The five people are
Oswald Spengler (the prophet) - He thought each civilization had an architype that the people tried to live up to. For Europeans it was to do everything more. To dominate, to explore, to discover, etc. He called it the Faustian man. Pretty much your basic fascism tropes though he wasnât a part of a fascist party. He was a relativist too in the sense that he didnât think civilizations could adapt or assimilate. You had your culture and that was it.
He thought that liberalism with itâs push for equality and ideas reducing hierarchy removed the ability for the European man to live up to his potential and therefore Europe will decline while other civilizations live up to their architypes.
Spengler had made his name as a prophet of cultural decline, and his final prediction was his most provocative. He predicted a crisis, the âmost severeâ in human history, that would test the strength of the entire Western world. At present âno one sees, or dares to see it,â but the willingness of Europeans and Americans to face it together, without the false comfort of illusions or sentimentality, would determine the shape of history.3 What did Spengler see? Near the turn of the millennium, the West would confront the âcolored world-revolution,â the rise of âcoloredâ nations into positions of increasing parity with the âwhite world.â The revolution will not arrive by force of arms, he cautioned. It will arrive as Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern peoples, equipped with Western science and technology, realize that the era of global white supremacy is over. Having at last âcome to feel their own common strength,â they will set out to enter modernity on their own terms, without colonial supervision. This revolution, and not the one underway in Germany, will present the true hour of decision.4
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 19). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Julius Evola (the fantasist)
Evola was raised in a Catholic family, and his diagnosis of contemporary life often sounded Christian, which it emphatically was not. The basic problem with modernity is âdesacralization,â the collapse of spiritual meaning in daily life. Work, family, leisure, and citizenship are no longer saturated with spiritual importance, but are understood in functionally secular terms. âMan, like never before, has lost every possibility of contact with metaphysical reality,â Evola wrote, because materialism âkills every possibility, deflects every intent, and paralyzes every attemptâ at aspiring to a higher form of life.11 Following GuĂ©non, Evola traced the disorders of modernity to its loss of contact with Tradition, which he interpreted in political terms. Astonishingly, he did not date the break to the Enlightenment, the Reformation, or the end of antiquity. No, the world has been slouching into spiritual poverty since the eighth century BC, when the world of Tradition began to disappear, just as historical consciousness began to dawn.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (pp. 45-46). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Human beings must eat, mate, fight, die, play, and obeyâand it was the purpose of Tradition to turn these mortal necessities into holy occasions. Tradition thereby protected human beings, healing the gap between their understanding of the social world and its fearful complexity. Evolaâs profound suggestion was that Tradition shelters human beings from the ravages of mortality, change, and contingency. It was his most humane insight and his most deeply felt problem. Human life is threatened by direct exposure to its own impermanence, and all societies are horrified by their own extinction. Tradition offers protection from the terror of time, creating islands of unchanging order in a sea of flux and decay. In a revealing phrase, Evola spoke of Tradition as a âforce that consumes time and history.â15 Tradition is therefore the triumph of order over chaos. Yet the triumph requires human effort, and without the active imposition of âform,â the âmatterâ of human life inevitably degenerates. At the heart of Evolaâs work was a defense of the sacrality of political authority. The hierarchy of nature will collapse and the healing of time will fail, he maintained, if not guarded by transcendent authority. Evola looked into the past and saw what modernity, in its blindness and hubris, could no longer perceive: true power and authority always come from above, never from below.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 48). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
If Tradition ordered life from above, liberalism emancipated it from below. Evola rarely cited intellectual authorities, and he never named, let alone examined, major philosophers in the liberal tradition. But Evola understood something important about liberalism, arguing that it transformed human life through a radical moral appeal. Liberalism demanded that political authority and social inequalities require special justification. The philosophical differences between Locke, Rousseau, and Mazzini are unimportant, Evola implied, when compared to their shared suspicion of traditional authority. Liberalism submits social hierarchies to popular scrutiny, rather than shielding them from it. Its deepest principle is that authority flows from below to above, and that a ruler is legitimate only when ratified by the consent of the ruled. Evola was horrified by the âanti-traditionalâ character of liberalism, especially its desire to free individuals from relationships of command and obedience. Everything he reveredâsocial castes, natural inequalities, and sacred privilegesâwas targeted by liberalism for reform or abolition. He regarded the founding of the Italian Republic in 1871 as a calamity, but saved his harshest criticisms for the United States. It was a place where âanyone can be anyone he wants to beâ and âeach person can presume to possess the potential of everyone else,â he complained. Worst of all, âthe terms âsuperiorâ and âinferiorâ lose their meaning.â
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 50). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
He lived his life as a kind of spiritual mentor to fascists, reactionaries, etc. Lots of the Years of Lead people said they took direct inspiration from him and he always side stepped responsibility saying that he never directly condoned what they did, but only âpreachedâ higher ideals not related to any specific political time period, but it was basically all wink and nod to reactionaries
Francis Parker Yockey (the anti Semite) - guy who first came up with cultural Marxism, came up with the idea that a post Soviet Russia would become a lodestone for the reactionary right (he came up with the idea during the Soviet era when Stalin executed Jews. He saw it as native Russia throwing off Jewish bolshevism and returning to its roots) and who also lead a pretty crazy life
His primary fear was not that Jews had seized control of political institutions or manipulated the invisible levers of economic power. Yockey attempted to turn vulgar anti-Semitism on its head and to refine its explanatory power. His deepest worry was not that Westerners might be exploited by Jews. It was that they might unwittingly become Jews. There indeed was a Jewish conspiracy at work in the modern world. It took place on a metaphysical plane, he asserted, and yet had little to do with the religious practice of Judaism. Yockey identified the Jewish spirit with a certain strain of post-Enlightenment rationality. Its distinguishing mark was a mentality of suspicion, and its message spread wherever critical rationality punctured the pretentions of European life. Its most powerful expression was found in the theories of Marx and Freud, and Yockey devoted considerable time to analyzing their intellectual legacies.21 He identified them as the most destructive of all assaults on Western culture, since they used the tools of Western rationality to strike at its very soul. They did so by unmasking appearancesâby showing that behind the impressive façade of Western life hid deeply unflattering truths. Its artistic and political traditions were not the expression of a unique aspiration for beauty and excellence. They were products of the most common drives for mammon and sex. Yockey believed that these ideas, and their countless insinuations in entertainment and education, did more than undermine the self-conception of Western peoples. They aimed at nothing less than âthe animalization of Culture-man.â
Yockeyâs anti-Semitism borrowed tropes from Christian historyâthat Jews are legalistic, fleshly, and unbelievingâand recoded them into modern, secular terms. Jews became a people defined by their materialism, skepticism, and reliance on critical theory, and to adopt this mentality was, for Yockey, to see the world in Jewish termsâindeed, to become effectively Jewish.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 77). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Family breakdown, blurred gender roles, degrading popular music, rampant consumerism, and the all-round rise of social deviancyâall were attributed to Jewish ideas that served to liberate human desires from social control. In Yockeyâs phantasmagoria, the Jews were simply everywhere in modern life, lurking behind both capitalism and communism, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, higher education and mass entertainment. Yockey therefore saw the twentieth century as the long-awaited time and place of the Jewsâ metaphysical revenge on their host culture. It was rationality that Jews had distorted. No longer a power for commanding reality, it had become a critical faculty grounded in our shared frailty. It turned its users from deference toward heroes and encouraged suspicion about inequalities; away from respect for high culture, towards a fascination with triviality.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 78). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
To them âcultural Marxismâ is the massively influential project of redistributing cultural power and representation, especially as it intersects with differences of race, sex, and gender. Yockey was one of the first to fabricate a counterdiscourse to it, one that identified its ideals not as part of the rich legacy of Western self-criticism, but as lethal to its very existence. By the late 1960s, his ideas (and image) would be invoked by campus activists claiming that tenured disciples of Marx and Freud were destroying American culture. They would not be the last.27
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 79). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Alain de Benoist (the Pagan) - French guy who popularized that liberalism âsame-izesâ everything. Iâm thinking the Eddington rant in Deep Space Nine
Benoist rejects liberalismâs holiest principle, and the religious faith on which it secretly rests. What makes political life possible is not discovering what we share in common. It is recognizing what permanently sets us apart.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 89). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
He believes in nominism. That is that there are no true universal principles, people can only understand things within their own time, place, and culture and âuniversal principlesâ are only things that people think are universal, but arenât.
Because thereâs no universalism, then the only meaning and way to have meaning is through your community and culture and the way to define a culture is to have a âtheyâ who âweâ are not.
While Benoist has never made a secret of his admiration for illiberal thinkers, he insists that politics is not founded on the identification of enemies.33 Hostility is created by the denial of group differences, he argues, not their positive recognition. One of the signature experiences of reading Benoist is witnessing him defend the necessity of confrontation and exclusion for the practice of peace and tolerance. The ambition of this meta-political project is truly astonishing, since it celebrates the values of diversity and difference at the same time that it exalts the importance of hierarchy and exclusion. To hear Benoist, it is almost as if the open society of modernity could be possible only within the closed society of antiquity.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 102). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Even in its most profane forms, liberalism therefore continues an evangelical mission to build a global world in which there is no âtheyâ and only a âwe,â proselytizing not with the message that we are all made in the image of God, but with the dogma that we are all the same.35 Benoistâs criticism is not that human loyalties are stretched too thin by being attached to cosmopolitan ideals. His objection is moral, not practical: the ideal of a universal community, open in principle to all people, is a moral evil. Because liberal ideals claim to transcend particular times and places, they must bring about a corruption of communal meaning and a perversion of human identities. They tempt a culture into seeing its way of life as universal, while inwardly depleting the particular attachments that make it possible. Benoist is for this reason vehemently anti-American. âThe United States is not a country like any other; it is a land without a people,â he has written, since it is founded on the illusion of self-evident truths.36 But whether grounded in biblical religion or its secular surrogates, universal truths cannot animate the spirit of a rooted people and its institutions, art, manners, and values. In Benoistâs language, they are abstractions that sever the intimate bonds by which human identity is constituted. They make us strangers even in our earthly homelands.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 103). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
But if the racist denies that all races should be regarded as equal, then Benoist is guilty. He professes to be âanti-egalitarianâ in both political and racial matters. From his study of ancient democracy he concluded that all political communities are properly founded on inequality (namely that between citizen and noncitizen) and that equality is a mistaken value in any domain. Its error is philosophical: it considers âsamenessâ more fundamental than difference.45 Racial equality is therefore a self-undermining value. Its defenders believe they are recognizing and defending the common human worth of different ethnicities. Benoist alleges that the opposite is true. When different racial identities are deemed equal in some essential respect, their diversity is effectively suppressed. They become representatives of a single humankind, expressions of a universal type, rather than being valued in their uniqueness. What equality seeks to protect, it thereby destroys.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (pp. 105-106). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
His main way for hooking into the radical right is identitarianism
Identitarianism is a youth movement, existing on the far right of European life, that claims Europe as the rightful and exclusive possession of its historic peoples. Its activists warn that Europeans are being culturally âreplacedâ by African and Middle Eastern immigrants, who are attempting a reverse colonization of Western nations. Yet identitarianismâs ideology repudiates the language of mainstream conservatism, and especially its Christian grammar. It appeals to diversity and differences, not to moral absolutes, and its posture is one of victimhood, not supremacy.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 109). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Samuel Francis ( the nationalist) - Guy who worked with the paleo conservatives and gleamed the idea of the âradical middle classâ and MAGAâism
Journalists on the left and the right, in search of the elusive source code of Trumpism, have looked to his books and essays as its possible origin. They are drawn not only by his prescient politicsâa blend of economic populism and cultural nativismâbut by his prediction that liberal hegemony would be contested by a âMiddle American revolutionâ led by a nationalist president.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 113). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
It points to a conservatism whose chief goal is no longer to promote lower taxes at home and liberal democracy abroad. It is to overthrow an existing elite with one drawn from the historic core of the nation. âThe real masters of the house,â vowed Francis, âare ready to repossess it and drive out the usurpers.â4
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (pp. 113-114). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Francisâs great insight was that disagreements between liberalism and conservatism are best understood as antagonisms between rival elites and their supporters. As in all revolutions, he explained, new elites had to displace those who preceded them, and whose lingering presence hampers the revolutionâs growth.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 121). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
The purpose of Leviathan becomes dramatically clear in its staging of this conflict. Liberalism does what all ideologies do: it rationalizes and justifies the rule of an elite minority. Francis acknowledged that liberalism is a diverse intellectual tradition and that many people believe passionately passionately in its doctrines, even at cost to themselves. But its political function (its real meaning) was to advance the interests of some groups and to suppress the interests of others. Francis examined the policy goals of postwar liberalism in crime, poverty, public health, and education. In every case, he alleged, they aligned with the structural interests of elites. What connected the welfare state, feminism, employment protections, school reform, and liberal internationalism? Francisâs undeviating answer was that they serve managerial power through a leveling process of âhomogenization.â
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 122). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Thatâs where you get the idea of the administrative state or the managerial class vs middle class Americans who are still attached to a nation, city, church, etc
On its surface, liberalism promoted a fairer social contract and equal protections for all. But beneath its egalitarian aspect, Francis claimed, hid its true vindictive purpose: subverting traditional ways of life. âIt is imperative,â he wrote, âfor elites to challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and institutional fabric of traditional society.â14 Francis wanted his readers to see in liberalism a coordinated project of ongoing cultural dispossession. Its long march through American life, he warned, will eventually target every symbol and institution of an older social order. National loyalty, traditional moral codes, the heroes and founders of American cultureâin time, all will be subjected to an accelerating campaign of ideological revision waged through legislation and media. In doing so, Francis explained, liberalism acquires more than moral legitimacy. It draws a replenishing base of support from those it emancipates from outdated social norms.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (pp. 122-123). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
MARs [Middle Class Revolutionaries] feel they are members of an exploited classâexcluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance, and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions. Their sense of grievance points both upward and downward. They believe they are neglected, even preyed upon, by a leadership class who simultaneously favor the rich and the poor over the interests of the middle class. âIf there is one single summation of the MAR perspective,â Francis wrote, âit is reflected in a statement: The rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.â16
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (pp. 124-125). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
It was a social movement, about to be born, that would unapologetically place citizens over foreigners; majorities over minorities; the native-born over recent immigrants; the ordinary over the transgressive; and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 126). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
One glaring problem with Fracis was/ is that heâs an unrepentant racist and his middle class revolutionaries were white MARs. Kind of ironic that my hitting up the resentment without the explicit race part it does seem to be attracting minority MARs as well. In any case is open racism pushed him out of respectable circles
The new right will have âless use for the rhetorical trope and the extended syllogism than for the mass rally.â32 It will drop the nostalgic language of âBoy Scout jamboreesâ and speak frankly about rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Francis urged conservatives to build a movement around a president who could channel the passions of forgotten Americans. He again drew from Spengler, encouraging them âto make use of Caesarism and the mass loyalties that a charismatic leader inspires.â
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (pp. 133-134). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
The book is written from a left leaning Christian perspective so he covers what each of them think about Christianity. The overall sense is that the new right, intellectually, has a very dim view of Christianity, actually blaming it from a lot of the ills.
For the movementâs leaders are not only openly illiberal and racialist; they are also anti-Christian, flaunting their rejection of Christianity and their desire to convert believers away from it. Greg Johnson, an influential theorist, denies that âChristianity constitutes a viable vehicle for the perpetuation of the European peoples and their culture.â Activist Richard Spencer laments that âChristianity provides an identity that is above or before racial and ethnic identity.â Academic psychologist Kevin MacDonald argues that contemporary Christianity offers encouragement to an âanti-white revolution.â Essayist Gregory Hood claims that âChristianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.â A major work of alt-right history concludes: âThe introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.â2
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (p. 138). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
Politically the books says that the new right will go one of two ways, jettison Christianity as a whole and look to new religious forms to reinforce tradition, or
But a post-Christian right could also appear in a more deceptive form, exploiting openings on the religious right rather than the secular left. It could clothe itself in Christianity, claiming a religious mantle for its defense of ethnic or cultural identity. Not all nationalisms are anti-Christian, of course, but some are. The theological marks of a false nationalism include: the idea that an individual is Christian in virtue of being born into a particular ethnicity or nation; the idea that a people is innately Christian in virtue of its history or culture; the idea that Christianity is an inheritance a people possesses as its own, rather than a gift they share with others; the idea that a Christian community is closed to those outside its ethno-cultural boundaries. All these ideas understand Christianity as something that originates from within a people, as an expression of their identity, rather than something that comes to it from without.
Rose, Matthew. A World after Liberalism (pp. 147-148). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
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I feel like I just read a book 
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I was on vacation so I read a couple dystopian novels.
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi - I liked this better than his Windup Girl, which was also very good. Set in Arizona / Nevada where the Colorado River has mostly dried up and powers are fighting over water rights.
The Last by Hanna Jameson. Set in a Swiss hotel, thereâs a nuclear war and an American historian trapped there documents it. Thereâs a little bit of a whodunnit with him trying to solve a murder. It was a fast read, but pretty empty. The bit that was the most fun - thereâs a blond libertarian woman named Tomi, clearly somewhat based on the RWNJ Tomi, and one of the characters keeps getting her name wrong.
Also finally read Say Nothing which I think I added to my list after seeing it recommended here by @Trolly. It was terrific - I knew very little about The Troubles, which may have increased itâs impact on me.
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Not much of a reader but I just finished Project Hail Mary audiobook at my wifeâs behest. I donât think Iâve ever enjoyed a book as much as I did that one. The audiobook brings so much life to it. 10/10.
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I read it recently and liked it a lot as well.
Adding it to my list. Thx.
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Yep this was a fantastic book. The inevitable movie could be great if done right.
Iâm really enjoying The Three Body Problem, although it panders heavily to science nerds so I may be biased. Very out-there sci-fi concepts that I donât think Iâve seen anywhere else. Donât think the inevitable streaming adaptation will hold up unless they manage to get real quality visual effects.
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Literally came here to post about this book/series
Step bro recommended this one and I enjoyed book 1.
It does help to have rudimentary knowledge of string theory though
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What do people use if they listen to audio books? I looked for the book and wasnât sure what I want. I could do the free audible month but then its amazon again. On the other hand the price for the audio book was twice as expensive as the standard book if I wouldnt have audible. I dont want to buy another device to carry around so its my Samsung mobile or nothing.
Lots of public libraries have audiobook apps these days.
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Libby
Overdrive
Sometimes I baller it up on audible
Just finished this and really enjoyed it. Also a hat tip for the original rec to @Rugby. This is exactly how I like my dystopian fiction - near future, thematically plausible if not entirely believable, and cynical as heck. Not sure Iâd call it sci-fi. Seems more like a fictional story set in an world only slightly embellished from whatâs probably going to happen.
Cliffs: If you live in Arizona, move. Or anywhere in the southwest, really.
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It has some great moments too
the scene where she is high and happy in bed and just slides off the other side of the bed is amazing.
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Wind up girl also really fun. Although a bit more sci fi.
âIâm glad my mom died,â memoir by an icarly star that was abused throughout the run of the show. she does write in her childâs voice and perspective as she retells the story, which makes me cringe for some reason, but that was her choice I guess and probably had a reason
1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus
Canât remember if I got the rec from here. Interesting and informative.
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Wow, I just searched for this book on amazon and there were probably few more recommendations of books I would also like to read.
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