Politics Board Book, TV or Movie Recommendation Thread

Well worth reading. A pretty good depiction of how the US has come to reward mediocrity and stupidity in politics.

Assuming you have read this masterpiece, if not for any other reason, you must appreciate the labour put into it.

I saw Kubrick's Paths of Glory today. Still very watchable more than 50 years after its release. Kirk Douglas plays the part of one of the only decent men in the French officer's corps during the Great War.

Definitely not one to watch if you're in it for the action and glorification of the soldier. Solid film.

Here's a good one, if you're into some serious fiction.

Im reminded of a bookstore browse in Atlanta's Hartsfield Aitport. The entire 'Left Behind' series was filed in non-fiction.

Kubrick's my favorite director, and I love Paths of Glory, but Breaker Morant covers the same themes and does so even better.

You can watch it streaming if you have Netflix.

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

I've just started reading one of my Christmas pressies and so far it has lived up to expectations.

Left Illusions - An Intellectual Odyssey by David Horowitz

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

When I flew out of Boston a couple decades back, I was surprised to find The Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger on the shelf of an airport bookstore. Not exactly airplane reading by my standards, but I'm led to conclude that Logan maintains higher standards than Atlanta. Speaking of standards...

the word "intellectual" does not apply to "David Horowitz"

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

And how do you make that out chummy?

I've also got The Anti Chomsky Reader - Peter Collier and David Horowitz, editors.

It explores such things as Chomsky's Anti-American obsession, his bizarre involement with neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionism. And also his support of Pol Pot.

It looks a good un.

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

Just as a matter of interest do you ever read anything that DOESN'T agree with your world view?... or are you afraid your brain, (such as it is), would explode.

Re: Politics Board Book Recommendation Thread

The Global Debt Trap by Claus Vogt & Roland Leuschel

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Global-Debt-Trap-Escape-Fortune/dp/0470767235/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294875529&sr=8-1"]Amazon.com: The Global Debt Trap: How to Escape the Danger and Build a Fortune (9780470767238): Claus Vogt, Roland Leuschel, Martin D. Weiss: Books[/ame]

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images...ow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Griftopia by Rolling Stone's Matt Tiaibbi. A good read as long as you're into polemic. He's... let's say, 'a little upset'

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131106798

In 2008, Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi was hanging around with the rest of the press corps after one of John McCain's campaign speeches.

The Arizona senator and presidential candidate had railed about skyrocketing gas prices. "He was going into his whole drill-baby-drill routine," Taibbi recalls. "The press corps were all joking about it afterward."

As if the current price spike was a result of America's failure to drill in Gulf of Mexico, they laughed. "Do we actually know what's causing the spike in gas prices?" Taibbi asked. Silence followed. "Nobody knew the answer," he says. "I didn't know the answer."

"It occurred to me, here we are covering an exploding economy — and none of us have any idea about what actually caused any of it."

Since then, Taibbi's columns have been a destination for those trying to understand what happened in the aftermath of the financial meltdown. His new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, tries to make the subject even clearer in the colorful language Taibbi's readers know well.

"All these big institutional investors essentially got sold oregano when they thought they were buying weed," Taibbi tells NPR's Guy Raz.

I'm not going to have time to read it in the immediate future, but Francis Fukuyama, famous for declaring "The End of History" at the fall of Communism, has been doing some serious rethinking over the past decade. He's written The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Slate has a review

Francis Fukuyama is one of the giants of post-Cold War political thought. His essay "The End of History," published in 1989 just before the Berlin Wall came down, provided the perfect framework for thinking about a new world order in which the old face-offs between competing ideologies were ending and liberal, capitalist democracy was sweeping the planet.

Twenty-odd years on, though, we continue to live in a world where democracy, prosperity, and law and order are unevenly distributed, and in his latest book, The Origins of Political Order—the first of a planned pair—Francis Fukuyama asks the obvious question: Why?

The answer, he suggests, lies not in philosophy, which drove so much of the argument of "The End of History"—expanded into a book, The End of History and the Last Man, in 1999—but in history itself. And lots of history: This book is extraordinary in its breadth, ranging from the Qin dynasty in third century B.C. China to the eve of the American and French revolutions some 2,000 years later. Along the way, Fukuyama takes in the history of ancient India, the medieval Mamluks, and the Ottoman Empire, the anthropology of Africa, the politics of Papua New Guinea, and plenty more besides. It is a tour de force.

At the heart of this remarkable book is the idea of "getting to Denmark." By this, Fukuyama means creating stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies (like Denmark). As in his "End of History" essay, Fukuyama treats this as the logical endpoint of social development, and suggests that Denmarkness requires three things: functioning states, rule of law, and accountable government.

The problem, though, is that this trinity cannot simply be willed into existence. As we have seen in the last few months, overthrowing authoritarian rulers (such as the ones who have cursed the Middle East for so long) does not instantly unleash open societies. Fukuyama suggests that if politicians outside the West are to lead their countries toward Denmark, rather than toward somewhere like Iran, they need to understand—and replicate—the processes that have worked in the past. And that means understanding the history of political order.

The problem, though, is that this trinity cannot simply be willed into existence. As we have seen in the last few months, overthrowing authoritarian rulers (such as the ones who have cursed the Middle East for so long) does not instantly unleash open societies. Fukuyama suggests that if politicians outside the West are to lead their countries toward Denmark, rather than toward somewhere like Iran, they need to understand—and replicate—the processes that have worked in the past. And that means understanding the history of political order.

Fukuyama was on Colbert a couple nights ago, but I haven't had time to watch it yet. I wonder how many essays I did on him between college and law school...

He's a gift to students. You can quote a two-sentence passage, then spend about three pages speculating about what it probably means. You read five paragraphs, pick out three or four quotes, you get a 10 page paper.

I liked his reaction to hearing about OBL.

I was trying to remember...I think the last paper I wrote was something like Hegel, Marx, and Fukuyama: a Counterfactual Dialectic on the Global South and the Future of International Environmental Regulation. It was just as much bullshit as it sounds like.

Well that, in itself, as a kind of achievement so... well done

Civilisation:Is the West History?

It's a six part documentary (plus book) shown on Ch4 by top British historian and Harvard professor Nail Ferguson (you may know him from his appearances on the Glenn Beck Show).

He gives six reasons (one each episode) why the West has been so superior to the rest for so long. Obvious ones such as science and democracy but also the protestant work ethic which played such a part in North America being so much more successful than South America, Northern Europe more than Southern Europe, and obviously the backward Muslim countries.

I was just watching a little of one episode on science - here's an interesting little tit-bit for you: Israel has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country in the world. And Israeli inventors in 2008 alone applied for 9,591 new patients compared to the equivalent figure of 50 for Iran.

5 STARS The Guardian

NAIL Ferguson, eh? Brother of Niall I assume.

Are you TRYING to put people off it?

Got GREAT info that this work is informing how both the POTUS AND some of the GOP contenders currently receive information...

Two years ago, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco set out to take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. They wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the searing account of their travels.
The book starts in the western plains, where Native Americans were sacrificed in the giddy race for land and empire. It moves to the old manufacturing centers and coal fields that fueled the industrial revolution, but now lie depleted and in decay. It follows the steady downward spiral of American labor into the nation's produce fields and ends in Zuccotti Park where a new generation revolts against a corporate state that has handed to the young an economic, political, cultural and environmental catastrophe.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt