Just proud of myself and wanted to brag, but I missed that post from a few days ago. AMA about any of these if you're curious:
books
January
Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey
Robert Nichols - Theft is Property!
Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem
Tom O'Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Andre Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Aph Ko - Racism as Zoological Witchcraft
Various Authors - Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Fiction
Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, & Pun Ngai - Dying for an iPhone
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Found and the Lost (13 novellas)
W. E. B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
Brian Moore - The Magician's Wife
February
Charles Taylor - Modern Social Imaginaries
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
William Blum - Killing Hope
Michelle Good - Five Little Indians
Kristen J. Sollée - Witches, Sluts, Feminists
March
Catherine Hernandez - Scarborough
Jane Jacobs - The Life and Death of Great American Cities
Omar El Akkad - What Strange Paradise
Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols - The Rust Programming Language
Esi Edugyan - Washington Black
April
Clayton Thomas-Müeller - Life in the City of Dirty Water
Marcel Proust - In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Aditya Bhargava - Grokking Algorithms
Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest
May
Karl Marx - Capital Vol. 3
June
Peter Watts - Blindsight
John P. Clark - Between Earth and Empire
Marcel Proust - Guermantes Way
Jessica Fern - Polysecure
Sara Collins - Confessions of Frannie Langton
G. W. F. Hegel - Introduction to the Philosophy of History
July
Xiran Jay Zhao - Iron Widow
Kim Moody - Tramps and Trade Union Travelers
Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
Itzik Ben-Gan - T-SQL Fundamentals
August
Homer - The Illiad
Keith Basso - Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache
September
Marcel Proust - Sodom and Gomorrah
Richard Lachmann - First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers
October
Marcel Proust - The Prisoner
James Ladyman and Don Ross - Every Thing Must Go
November
Marcel Proust - The Fugitive
Gabor Maté & Daniel Maté - The Myth of Normal
Nora Roberts - Origin in Death
Stephanie Kelton - The Deficit Myth
December
Marcel Proust - Finding Time Again
Tyler A. Shipley - Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination
Adrienne Maree Brown - Grievers
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
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My takeaway is that Hegel is personally an asswipe but I do have a soft spot for his philosophy. Dialectical reasoning is very old but his dialectics are novel and eye-opening. I find a peculiar connection between them and Douglas Hofstadter's reasoning on consciousness and life patterns as strange, self-referential loops that crosses levels of meaning or planes of action. I don't know if the book I read was the greatest introduction but it did well enough. I always have to recommend this comment (warning: :reddit-logo: ) as a great primer.
Some of it takes a bit of translating maybe - e.g. when he says the state is the highest expression of freedom, it comes off as a bit strange to someone on the other side of the 19th and 20th centuries, but my understanding is that perspective sees the state as a mechanism for the Geist to finally be able to express itself intentionally.
As for The Deficit Myth, it was a good book that I think is largely accurate about how money works in a modern economy. At times it was a bit too painfully simplistic and repetitive, but she did nail down the point well. If you have no exposure to MMT it's not a bad read - if you do, you probably don't need to read it unless you think MMT means printing money.
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I'd say that one is not a bad place to start
and especially because it's short. I want to try more Hegel this year but I may need some prerequisites.Yup haha. While I think their framework of the money system is a useful tool in any lefty's toolbox, it always seems like the logical mode of action is: we need to educate more people about MMT, then those people can vote accordingly for politicians with the same understanding, and then we can finally fund all the social democratic public services. Easy as pie!
I think in the end they're really missing a more cynical understanding of capitalist power. Regardless of the money question, it's impossible to allot more real resources and human labour to providing nice things for everyone and a functional society without someone at the top losing some amount of power or control they held over those resources and that labour, and so they're going to use whatever they have in their arsenal to prevent that from happening.
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Mine was a physical copy, translated by Leo Rauch, with an appendix from The Philosophy of Right.
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