It's a good book but suffers from the same problem as Late Victorian Holocausts which is that the endless parade of horrors that all so resemble each other compact into a vague unspecific "they did bad things" impression. Unfortunate that our brains cannot actually handle all the discrete events, each one which shattered the worlds and permanently ended or changed the course of dozens of lives, but it is what it is.
what books would you recommend that dont do that (in relation to a this or a similar subject matter)
The Jakarta Method and If We Burn managed to balance event recitation & analysis fairly well. They both probably trace the outer limit of how many discrete events can be covered & analyzed in a single book - fewer than 10 I'd say, obviously with all of them having a series of important sub-events. Also emphasizing the salient features of each event to differentiate them in the mind.
I'm reading Atrocity fabrication and it's consequences by A.B. Abrams and so far it's not just atrocity buy analysis.
Yeah, it was a hard read for me in doses of more than a handful of pages at a time. I wish I could have absorbed more of it, but the horrors just kind of wash over you after a while and that's not the impact I think the material deserved. More of a me problem than an issue with the book, I think. It's a great resource to reference.
What other kind of circle is there? Are spheres not a thing anymore?
Some folks in here clearly never figured out the toddlers shape-sorting game.
It’s a reference to True Detective which is a reference to Nietzsche. Maybe don’t start insulting people’s intelligence when you don’t even understand the joke
Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle. (this is a translation, so there's various versions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mhZBLUyybo
Basically people here just like Rust and identify with his cynical and jaded outlook, and in our lowest moments agree that we don't want to know anything anymore and history has no justice and truth is crooked. Rust is a cool guy. It's about that simple.
It also dovetails in with Marx's quote about history repeating itself. Once as tragedy, then as farce. History just keeps happening over and over and getting stupider and stupider and nobody is learning anything.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
imagine being such a ackchually nerd you start correcting common sayings that are obviously just stretched out so they sound better. go point out that pulling yourself up by the bootstraps is physically impossible and that having your cake and eat it to is in the wrong order somewhere else.
I have never heard the phrase "a flat circle". Certainly uncommon here. I work in 3d, so this stood out as particularly unusual.
Part of the reason, I think, for the explicit "flatness" of the circle in the meme/line is that time is particularly stuck in endless repetition.
If a circle was not flat, or in other words if it was rising or descending, then it could be said that it is a spiral. A spiral could be ascending or descending, in which case you could say history or time is progressing or degressing. But this implies change and movement. The particular pessimism of the line is that there is no change or end-point to history, no growth or degradation, it is not even as meaningful as any of that, time is simply just stuck in flat repetition.
