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When we weren’t walking the streets of Haqlaniyah with machine guns, we read. Books passed through our hands like contraband. We were often too tired to hold a conversation, but we still had energy to pass off paperbacks like dime bags.
“This is class warfare by elites on the working class, in which the elites try to hide the way they have benefited from skyrocketing inequality by portraying themselves as more virtuous than those on the other side of the tracks, and thus more worthy of their good fortune. Call it COVID Calvinism: you aren’t simply lucky that your job allowed you to stay home or could never possibly be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English; you are more virtuous, and therefore justified in perpetuating the yawning gulf between yourself and the workers. You then use allegations of racism or sexism or transphobia to hide the class divide from which you are benefiting. Woke politics, in other words, is a smokescreen that obscures the realities of class.”
― Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
― Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
“The old Hoover Building had housed the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the Split, but the FBI was long gone. The People’s Bureau of Investigation now occupied that building and several others in the area, forming a huge complex dedicated to the dark work of internal security. The name “Hoover” had been scrubbed from the building and whitewashed from history when the People’s Republic had first arisen, but later came back when J. Edgar had been embraced as a pioneering example of resistance and the face of the toll oppression had taken upon gender-fluid individuals in the hateful old United States. His statue, in a flattering cocktail dress and a pair of strappy heels, graced the central foyer of the recently added annex.”
― Wildfire
― Wildfire
“It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.”
― Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
― Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
“The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow.”
― The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
― The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
“Prostitution was a miserable job, and all the more miserable when the location was next to a godforsaken military outpost in a hostile foreign country. The Japanese military did some appalling things during the war, but it did not programmatically and forcibly conscript—or dragoon, if you will—either Korean or Japanese women into providing sex. Some of the comfort women had been sold into this prostitution by abusive parents. Some had been defrauded by dishonest private recruiters. But many—probably most—were desperately poor women who deliberately chose to sell sex for the money. They worked in a wretched job, but they were not “sex slaves.” They were not “gang-raped.” They were not conscripted into the job at bayonet-point. Instead, they chose prostitution as (in their minds) the least bad option available to them. We deceive ourselves and insult impoverished women if we deny that they could have made such a decision for themselves.”
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THE COMMANDANT'S PROFESSIONAL READING LIST
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— last activity Sep 14, 2017 05:38PM
THE COMMANDANT'S PROFESSIONAL READING LIST (CPRL) AS PROMULGATED IN REFERENCE A REPRESENTS AN UPDATED VERSION OF THOSE BOOKS MOST PERTINENT FOR PROFE ...more
Military Professional Reading
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This group is primarily intended for active, reserve, retired or military veterans. This serves as a forum to discuss professional reading for militar ...more
Azriel’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Azriel’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
615 books
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27 friends
3,131 books
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1,348 books
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1,152 books
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140 friends
98 books
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727 books
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409 books
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154 books
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98 friends
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