So I’ve started reading the two books we selected:
– Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
– Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe
Chapter 1 for both of them is very short, so I assume most of you will not flake out on this. I may go ahead, but as you know I will be posting every Friday night. If you have a blog, post your own impressions and I will link that up. If you have a comment, put in a comment. If you are an “oral” expositor, I suppose I could link to a podcast.
The page for the book club will be updated over the next five months.
Hugo Mecier follows me on Twitter, so I’m going to try and see if he’s willing to do a livestream early in 2021 about Not Born Yesterday. I don’t know Stephen Platt, but am hoping to do the same thing with him if he’s open to it.
Remember, you only need to read one book. But really both are doable. I’m going to be reading some other things since one chapter a week is so leisurely.
As for why I’m doing the book club and just totally pessimistic about Western civilization:
So now a professor can be canceled for posing the question: “Do the positives of the Columbian Exchange outweigh the negatives?” Appalling behavior by @StJohnsU. Thank heavens for @TheFIREorg: https://t.co/iBUrGYhiAt
— Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) October 8, 2020
There are barbarians all around us. Just look. These people are no different than censorious religious radicals in the past. Except for religious radicals at least had some notional broader vision of the world and the good. These people only care about their own individual feels. Power uber alles.