Adam > Recent Status Updates

Digital bath, scrubbing us clean, feel the downfall, exfoliate.

We are so fucked

Why am I doing this to myself

It’s a like a switch flipped in the final chapter of part 2. From that point on, Arendt did revisions in subsequent editions. Those revisions turned this book from banal immediately into something horrifyingly predictive of our current situation.

The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.

History is definitely repeating itself. It’s going to be a fun next four years.

There’s been quite a lot in part 2 that I can’t see how it’s necessary to include to tell this story (as it was in part 1). Maybe all the good editors died in WWII?

The structure of the first section has been quite poor so far. Most notably, she mentions The Dreyfus Affair dozens of times in the first three chapters yet never explains until chapter 4. There’s also quite a lot of repetition and stuff that really doesn’t matter.

Once again, he’s not digging deep enough to know whether religion is doing something for our health or whether its community. In chapter 5, he talks about how the religiously active are healthier, but doesn’t compare the findings to other groupish organizations. To know if religion was doing something and not the sense of community and belonging, we’d have to compare against secular groupish organizations.

Multiple times already he’s talked about how belief (faith) or surrender to god or religion can reduce stress and anxiety. I’m sure that’s true for the individual. Ignorance is bliss. But in doing so, important faculties like the ability to critically think are diminished. There’s a reason why religious people spread Covid more. There’s a reason why religious people aren’t taking climate change seriously.

Nordhaus suffers from the plight of many economists when viewing increased prosperity from growth as something that benefits all humans. He claims the increase of gdp per capita will be good for humanity despite climate worsening. The glaring fallacy with that is averages mean nothing if wealth is concentrated among the relatively few.