I was watching some video and there was mention of someone getting 1984. Upon which, a guy said that this one (one who got 1984) will end up being radicalized. I was already born into a very radical environment so no needs of books to radicalize me (although I am trying to be moderate and chill now)
Unironically “Industrial Society and Its Future” by Ted Kaczynski.
I don’t agree with it at all. I think disabled people are people too, radical stance I know. But some points, especially about modern left and new technology becoming mandatory are well argued and true.
I always thought he was just a random looney and he’s definitely not. I think the book didn’t radicalize me but showed me what I believed to be true (that the guy was just a looney or evil) was wrong.
I don’t believe that the rise of technofascism can be stopped by hiding in the woods tho and I don’t think rejecting all tech will make everyone’s mental health immediately better, he does not at all take things like community and purpose into account.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
the Bible, unless you’re a physcopath, that shit will make you an atheist if you read it and don’t have cheery picked bits thrown at you by those trying to gas light you.
1984 is intertwined into the modern zietgiest
I am already an atheist and it was Quran who made me an atheist but yeah I am reading Bible and boy, the shit is insane there.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe.
The methodical whitewashing by Zionists of the crimes against the native inhabitants of Palestine combined with the crocodiles tears of liberal Zionists was eye opening to say the least.
I see some good choices here. For Americans, try An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher.
A People’s History of the United States blew my mind wide open in high school.
1984
Animal Farm
The Jungle
Slaughterhouse Five
Brave New World
A Farewell to Arms
Blood Meridian
Guns, Germs, and Steel
To Kill A Mockingbird
Bullshit Jobs
I know I at least read Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird when I was younger. I wonder how much those ended up influencing me. At the time I wouldn’t have totally agreed with them, and I don’t remember them having a particularly large influence, but they probably did affect me without me knowing. However, I also watched a lot of sci-fi and Star Trek, which probably had an even greater influence.
I wish there was a way to analyze our past and pick apart what effect different things had. It’d be really fun to know. I think when you consume something that you think really changes you, you were already primed for that change before. A lot of things lead up to that moment that you don’t even recognize.
Is last one really the title of book?
If you really want some solid Graeber, who tag-teamed with archaeologist David Wengrow, read The Dawn of Everything.
The cake is a lie and hierarchy is horseshit. Humans have left exploitative social structures (read: empires, Capitalism) and reorganized society before and we can do it again. There is physical evidence for thousands of years.
Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki. It took the blinders off and I became a convert to functional programming.
I like to joke about recursion and how it gets overused as a “good” programming practice, but I genuinely have a solid understanding of it and find it pretty intuitive… In OOP. I cannot wrap my head around tail recursion
Tail recursion is just recursion? I mean who cares if it’s the last thing done or not 😋 ?
Check out template meta programming if you want some recursion to blow your mind (like the variadic template).
Just reading about history has done that to me. I don’t really read fiction, but I read a ton of history, usually about one book per month or so. But seeing how the human history is just basically despair and misery, makes you a bit annoyed that we still haven’t gotten any better.
I agree with this but its kinda also that we seem to be going backward big time. If you look at ww1 to ww2 and how shorta time span that was with the depression and then look back on the last quarter decade. its like. this is some bull trump.
Yeah it puts things in perspective. Sadly, lately the perspective has been “this is awful and things will become even more awful for the next decade or two at least. Probably more.”
History books got names too!
You want something strictly relevant to all the messes we’re in today?
The Hundred Years' War on PalestineandThe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestineare must reads. Round them off withBeyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of HistoryThen read
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News MediaandManufacturing Consent(obligatory fuck pedo-associated and possibly pedo Chompsky).Take a break from reality and read a quick fiction:
The Trial.If you’re not radicalized by anger at this point, you’re one of the baddies.
Yeah I know. But I don’t like to recommend just random topics, because when I do, I’ve noticed that people just go “oh wasn’t interested in that” so I’d rather ask a bit about what topics and time periods people might be interested in, before recommending.
And to be clear, I don’t really have a specific book or books in mind that radicalized me. It happened by reading tens, or a hundred, books in the period of 10-15 years. So in that I can’t give a recommendation, other than, just start reading about stuff. Start with something you wanted to know, wanted to know more about or were interested in, then during reading that thing, note down anything else that comes to mind that might interest you. Either something the book mentioned or something that popped in your mind randomly. Then get a book about that thing. Repeat.
That’s how I got sunk into this hole of reading about history. I just go “huh, what’s that about?!” and proceed to find out. /r/askhistorians subreddit has a excellent reading list in their wiki, its sorted into periods and topics, easy to search. That’s a good place to start.
I mean 1984 did a pretty good job radicalizing me against fascism. I consider it radicalization because turns out America really likes fascism so I guess I’m in the minority.
But why then US fought Germany if US also likes fascism?
Read 1984 and you’ll understand. Or any history of a region just after WWII with insane leaders.
It’s not just a question of fascism or no fascism. It’s that fascist leaders only want their fascism out there. Neighboring fascist counties usually hate each other because of the competition.
The Grapes of Wrath
No Logo by Naomi Klein.
Unfortunately, it made me really against sweatshops and child labour. But most people want to hate stuff that come with very marginal costs, rether than things that force you to rethink how you live.
“I hate structural racism!”
“Like our clothes?”
“No, no…”Why are we calling being an empathetic individual and being against fascism “being radicalised”?
Because it is the correct use of the word. It is the american conservative propaganda machine which gave it the negative connotations.
Being antifascist matches at least two definitions of radical: “Favoring fundamental change, or change at the root cause of a matter” and “(slang) Excellent; awesome”
Being against fascists is normal. There is nothing radical about it. Only right wing extremists would call that being radicalised.
My question exactly
well it is just you. Radicalized can entail many things. When I was in early to mid teens, I have read and listened to extremists and that made me a hardcore extremist in my religion.
The Dispossessed
This was the one I came to mention lol.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Also from the introduction/short story The Day Before The Revolution:
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
