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5 teosta 287 jäsentä 9 arvostelua

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Image credit: 2008 eXile editor-in-chief Mark Ames press photo - Wikimedia Commons

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By an unfortunate coincidence, I ordered this book right before the 11/5 Fort Hood shooting tragedy, and after finishing it I was angry at how steadfastly unwilling the media (and much of society) are to ask the tough questions about why school and workplace shootings, which were almost completely unknown before the 1980s, have become such a grim and seemingly inevitable part of modern society. Mark Ames places the blame squarely on the new corporate culture of the Reagan years, where employees became expendable assets to be used up and thrown away. He chronicles in vivid detail the lives of these average people who "just snapped", and shows, using a lengthy and fascinating parallel to antebellum slave revolts, how time and time again these shootings were anything but random, how workers deliberately targeted their abusive and tyrannical supervisors while sparing coworkers they liked and yet their actions were always dismissed after the fact as "just random craziness" by a media systematically incapable of recognizing the recurring pattern. The same is true of school shootings like Columbine, where bullied and harassed students, routinely ignored by their school officials, felt that the only way they could bring their lives back under control was to go postal. It's hard to read this book and then read news stories about the Fort Hood tragedy, which is just the latest manifestation of the new ugliness in our society that Reagan symbolized and embodied. A good but extremely frustrating book.… (lisätietoja)
 
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aaronarnold | 4 muuta kirja-arvostelua | May 11, 2021 |
What would you write if you had complete editorial freedom in a foreign country plus a nearly unlimited amount of drugs and women willing to sleep with you? Each of these guys landed a book on my 2010 best-of list (Ames' Going Postal and Taibbi's The Great Derangement) because they're both great journalists who are also great writers, and this is their wildly entertaining retrospective of the muckraking magazine they ran for a decade in the middle of Russia's momentous transition away from Soviet communism towards almost unbelievably corrupt gangsterism. The fall of communism was life-changing for everyone who went though it; the collapse of order meant that Moscow went from stern showcase capital to near-anarchy extremely quickly, with plenty of fun to be had for the savvy American able to get in on the action. Ames' portions of the book tend to be more autobiographical, focusing on his own psychological motives for abandoning America to live in exile among the drug addicts and whores he found there, while Taibbi tends to focus on the unique aspects of reporting as an English language paper in a Russian-speaking country where the authorities were either completely indifferent or savagely hostile. It's hard not to be envious of their luck at being in such a unique time and place, and after reading this book, "wild and crazy guys" like Tucker Max will look like bland straight-edge douchebags to you. This is a book that should probably revolt you a little bit, but in a good way.… (lisätietoja)
 
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aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
A list of 100 Iraq War cheerleaders along with some choice quotes might seem not only dated and petty but irrelevant - who really cares what people said about the decision to go to war 15 years ago? Well, not only is it useful to remember just how stupid people were back in early 2003, it's truly surprising how many of these guys are still around in some form or fashion, their careers undaunted by some of the most ill-advised chickenhawking in American history. From Bush administration stooges to awful Fox News commentators to liberal journalists who really should have known better, Ames, who has probably never dropped a grudge in his life, collects some choice nuggets of support for The Dumbest War. I wouldn't call this an essential read, or even necessarily all that meaningful in 2017 when taken on its own terms. But in the current renaissance of xenophobic bigotry that is the Trump era, perhaps we can't have too many reminders that hysteria and groupthink can hijack just about anyone's better judgment - maybe even yours. That the overwhelming majority of these people continued being rich and successful is almost unbearable, but in a way all of the present day is one big endurance test for bullshit, of which these were only some of the biggest producers. Will we ever learn?… (lisätietoja)
 
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aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
This delves deeper into the history of the Kochs and their associates than either Dark Money or Democracy in Chains, neither of which touches on the outright racism that the Kochs were once allied with.

And still do when you look into the groups and extremist academics they fund through layers of fronts.

I would have appreciated footnotes with citations for many of the claims. It would be good to see this expanded into a full length book, incorporating the work UnKochMyCampus have done.… (lisätietoja)
 
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LamontCranston | 1 muu arvostelu | Mar 18, 2019 |

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Teokset
5
Jäseniä
287
Suosituimmuussija
#81,379
Arvio (tähdet)
3.8
Kirja-arvosteluja
9
ISBN:t
4
Kielet
1

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