Tom > Recent Status Updates

Really excited to read this one. I think it will end up being my favourite.

"As always everything worked flawlessly."

And Stratt is just a terrible character. Zero resolution. Just a "bad ass girl boss".

I'm not even bothering to comprehend the science stuff. Each problem gets an automatic solution and all I need to know is that we are now on Plotpoint B from Plotpoint A.

It's hard to tell when Weir is writing an annoying character on purpose because They. All. Sound. The. Same.

I simply do not believe that these are people talking.
We have a book full of bacon science redditors, purposely bitchy girlbosses, stereotypes, and 'i haz cheeseburger'.

Okay. First these poorly-designed flashbacks had some sort of in-story reason for the pacing, as it was literally Ryland having a mental flashback and his conscious sort of pauses and resumes as he absorbs the information.

Now. They are incredibly boring but now also, despite there being reveals, Ryland just doesn't react and neither does Rocky. Are these boring segments just for us now?

Basically halfway through this book and there is absolutely no point to this book. The flashbacks scenes are a painful snore-fest with obnoxious characters. And the prose is still awful.

Now that the plot has progressed to a decent percentage, I have to say that I expected *too much* plot-wise because that was really the only thing left keeping me reading.

The prose is getting a bit less unbearable now.
The dialogue is fine, if a bit juvenile but people do talk like this, especially like Ryland.

I am intrigued and the science explanations are fun to follow, but I am probably never going to be the target demographic of this book - even if I want to laugh at the idea of there being "no politics" in this book.

Each chapter ends with a: "Oh my god- It's actually [blank]!"

PHM seems to take place in an alternate dimension where Elementary Globalism turned out to exist in the real world of geopolitics. It's hard to take seriously but the book was written in 2020...so maybe I can't be *too* harsh as that was probably the last moment when cooperative internationalism existed before dying a brutal death.

Laughing b/c Weir said he dislikes "politics in books" - I see why.

Actual plot set-up is okay, even if Weir is simultaneously trying to absolutely make sure that you remember your high-school physics class but also info-dumping a nonsensical email with the same sort of "science speak".

The prose is terrible. Present tense is fine. The Hunger Games was written in present tense, but it didn't beat you over the head with Reddit tier humour and actually trusted your intelligence.

I just don't believe in the collective might of supposed "strong powers". "If only, if only" - just look at what's going on today and realize that nothing could have been done.

With the exception of Poland, it is agreed upon that Romania and Hungary were quite terrible and the policies/aspirations of the far-right in all three of those countries were pretty similar. Though allegedly, Poland didn't subscribe to race-based antisemitism - at least not to a considerable degree.

So I never agreed with the idea that Germans were uniquely evil or even uniquely apathetic. Fuck nationalism though.

That one family who begged to be the "exception" to the Nuremberg Laws and despised the "Eastern European Jew" b/c they agreed with the Nazis very much is f*cking wild.

How far does this radicalization get? When do the "Aryan" Germans start frothing at the teeth toward Slavs, Roma, and Jews?

Not even the Nazis could "force" women to increase the birth rate. However, the Nazi movement, in terms of its votes, was supported by women quite a bit. You could even argue that bourgeois women were some of the biggest supporters.

The obvious conclusion is that the Nazis did not care about 'society' beyond the symbolic symbols of change. None of their goals rested upon the material - merely the spiritual elevation of the German people. The ultimate goal: war.

But beyond war, the goal was so obviously - like those who try to bring back fascism today (though this time capitalism has progressed enough to bring this much on its own) - death.

The economics section was a bit dull, too many numbers, but that's mainly because I know nothing about the entirety of economics (I should fix that I know).

Self-justification.

Okay, so even *before* the outbreak of war, the total insistence on rearmament at all costs, led to a food shortage already - which merely self-justified the idea of the war of conquest.

So the whole 'at least the Nazis/Hitler were good for the economy' is completely Nazi propaganda that even seemingly 'liberal' institutions taught when I was young.

So it's consensus on the fact that the idea of "Hitler saved the German economy" only occurred because of rapid rearmament - the intent being to invade on two fronts in order to invade the entire continent.

Total war was intended from the very beginning.

Seems that the old-guard of conservative university professors managed to bypass the excesses of Nazi ideology in the humanities, but it's not as if these are the professors who embraced anti-nationalism - quite the opposite in fact.

But overall, I'd say that the students were more radically right and fanatical than the professors.

There is no doubt that the Nazis *wanted* a collective society, something which was preached in my high school education to mean that the Nazi shared "leftist" elements. That's b/c "leftist" = "collectivist" when in reality, leftism preaches, in various methods, action against HIERARCHY! The Nazis were obsessed with hierarchy, abolishing any other group which strayed from their system based on race and power.

If one compares the Hitler Youth/'alternative' education system in Nazi Germany as akin to military indoctrination (a key of 'classical' fascism) then I think modern-day Russia has far more elements of 'classical' fascism than the United States.

There's a niche idea that the Nazis prosecuted Christians. That's mostly false.
Christian thought leaders A.K.A priests/pastors who openly spoke against the Nazis on the basis of religion were prosecuted, but Christians, as a group, were not targeted by the Nazis like Jews or even "ideological enemies" such as Communists and Social Democrats.
Hardline Christians were seen as sheep to be converted - not prosecuted.

Catholic CSA was already being talked about in the 1930s, but it's obvious that the Nazis motivation on reporting on it was purely due to their hatred of the fact that Catholic clergy, unlike Protestants, are not as susceptible to the disease which is (ethnic) nationalism.

It's a shame that Catholic voters were largely just as oblivious as their Protestant counterparts.

The excellence of Evans' prose and navigation of this book is realized when you notice that throughout this chapter you've unknowingly been following the life of the man who wrote the "First they came for the..." poem until it's "revealed" at the very end.

And even then, Evans hits you skilfully over the head because he reminds you of the absence of one group in that poem: Catholics.