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"A bit too memoir-y for me. I wanted more gory details about the paleontology, but hearing the details was fun in its own right. Toward the end he lost me with an overly short dismissal of Gould's argument about the Burgess Shale and muh reverse-racism in the second to last paragraph (Mugabe bad but this after an entire story with black scientists conspicuously absent). Mostly good but not quite what I was after." — Dec 25, 2019 08:34PM
"A bit too memoir-y for me. I wanted more gory details about the paleontology, but hearing the details was fun in its own right. Toward the end he lost me with an overly short dismissal of Gould's argument about the Burgess Shale and muh reverse-racism in the second to last paragraph (Mugabe bad but this after an entire story with black scientists conspicuously absent). Mostly good but not quite what I was after." — Dec 25, 2019 08:34PM
The victims’ heads and penises are placed between their legs; only one of the dead has been allowed to retain his manhood. Uncomfortable as it may be, we must assume that the ancient Egyptians of Narmer’s time routinely humiliated their
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what the hell
“With the rest of my generation, I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.”15”
― Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
― Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
“The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has argued that this telegram, coming from the party leader himself at that overwrought moment, was a signal to begin mass searches and persecutions. His view is an interpretation, rather than solid proof: Stalin never wrote down, or never preserved, any document ordering famine. But in practice that telegram forced Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice. They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution or the confiscation of the rest of their food—after which they would also die of starvation.”
― Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
― Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
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“I know the South claims that it has spent millions for the education of the blacks, and that it has of its own free will shouldered this awful burden. It seems to be forgetful of the fact that these millions have been taken from the public tax funds for education, and that the law of political economy which recognizes the land owner as the one who really pays the taxes is not tenable. It would be just as reasonable for the relatively few land owners of Manhattan to complain that they had to stand the financial burden of the education of the thousands and thousands of children whose parents pay rent for tenements and flats. Let the millions of producing and consuming Negroes be taken out of the South, and it would be quickly seen how much less of public funds there would be to appropriate for education or any other purpose.”
― The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
― The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
“Plato presents Socrates as not using his remarks to rebut all the charges or to try to curry favor or beg for sympathy, as jurors expected defendants to do in serious cases like this one. Instead, he bluntly reiterated his unyielding dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining their preconceptions. The unexamined life, he famously stated, was not worth living. His irritating process of constant questioning, he maintained, would help his fellow citizens learn to live lives of excellence, and he would never stop doing that, no matter what penalty he might experience as a result. Furthermore, they should care not about their material possessions but about making their true selves—their souls—as good as possible. Nothing else should take priority. If he were to be acquitted, he baldly stated, he vowed to remain their stinging gadfly no matter what the consequences to himself.”
― Ancient Greece
― Ancient Greece
Thomas’s 2025 Year in Books
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421 books
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