Alec Whitmore

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Alec.


The Fort Bragg Ca...
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (54%)
Mar 04, 2026 04:33PM

 
Erotic Poems
Alec Whitmore is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Gogmagog
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Loading...
“The “ancestral sausage” goes back twenty thousand years to the Paleolithic era.”
Jamie Loftus, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs

Thomas  Frank
“For people in the group I have been describing, there’s nothing dysfunctional or disappointing about Democratic politics; it feels exactly right. And what is rightest and most inspiring about it is the”
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

Ted Chiang
“I was also interested in the idea of emotional relationships between humans and AIs, and I don’t mean humans becoming infatuated with sex robots. Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is. Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient. In all of those cases, the people are unwilling to make an effort. Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own. I’ve”
Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Thomas  Frank
“Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on. Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend. What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity—to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge that righteousness is always on their side. It is that sensibility, after all, that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values. Once that contradiction has been made manifest—once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.”
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

Thomas  Frank
“Then there are the psychic deliverables—the flattery, for starters. To members of the liberal class, the Democratic Party offers constant reminders that the technocratic order whose upper ranks they inhabit is rational and fair—that whether they work in software or derivative securities they are a deserving elite; creative, tolerant, enlightened. Though it is less tangible, the moral absolution in which Democrats deal is just as important. It seems to put their favorite constituents on the right side of every question, the right side of progress itself. It allows them to understand the war of our two parties as a kind of cosmic struggle between good and evil—a struggle in which they are on the side of light and justice, of course.”
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

year in books
Skye Pe...
469 books | 94 friends

Jesse P...
345 books | 60 friends

Brayli
208 books | 24 friends

Elanor
422 books | 22 friends

Samanth...
229 books | 92 friends

Ryan Ta...
165 books | 56 friends

Trevor ...
196 books | 12 friends

Jacob T...
281 books | 93 friends

More friends…



Polls voted on by Alec

Lists liked by Alec