All in Non Fiction
Hughes succeeded magnificently in cramming in 2500 years of history from the early Etruscans and aqueducts to the Caesars to shift from Paganism to Christianity to the Papal States to the Middle Ages, Renaissance, to Baroque and Classicism to Modernity and Mussolini into this book
One may be surprised that Albert Camus, a known existentialist philosopher, was quite familiar with anarchism, and he not only openly supported anarchist-syndicalist organizing, but also was excommunicated by the existentialists for criticizing their Marxist tendencies. Soon after reading The Stranger, I gladly discovered that Camus had in fact, already dealt thoroughly with the questions of nihilism, rebellion, revolutionary politics, and anarchism.
This is an analysis not of Britain, or the British Isles—but purely of the English. Tombs reviewed conventional beliefs about the past such as the Anglo-Saxon liberties, the common law, the influence of Magna Carta, and the cause and effect of the Industrial Revolution. Tombs also examined the ambiguities and aftermath of the Victorian age at the reasons for participating in the First World War, and the divided memories of that calamity.
This book carried out a cogent and fervent analysis claiming that the euro is flawed at birth and bound for failure. An immediate reform is required to prevent further devastation. In the absence of reform, an amicable divorce would be far preferable to the current approach of muddling through…
In a science dominated society, it is easy to forget that science and their methods are not inherently objective. Science is a tradition, with its own method of conceptualizing problems and deriving conclusions. Science is hypothetico-deductive. Scientists frame conjectures and test their logical consequences. A proposition is scientific if only it is falsifiable, otherwise it is metaphysical. However, there is no perfect method. The concept that a single method contains firm, unchangeable and binding principles in all situations is perilous.
Today, the European financial-cum-debt crisis rolls on from summit meeting to summit meeting, where German ideals of fiscal prudence clash with Spanish unemployment at 25 percent and a Greek state is slashing itself to insolvency and mass poverty while being given ever-more loans to do so. In the US, those problems take the form of sclerotic private sector growth, persistent unemployment, a hollowing out of middle-class opportunities, and a gridlocked state. What they have in common is their supposed cure: austerity.
This book is an exhaustive account of human exploitation on a gargantuan scale. It is about the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton, but more so about the history of human tragedy of war capitalism, imperial devastation, brutal slavery and echelon systems based on involuntary servitudes.
The present washed away the past. We forgot the yesterday where the Silk Roads is the bridges between the East and West where great centres of civilisation rose. Ancient civilisation such as Babylon, Nineveh, Uruk and Akkad in Mesopotamia were famed for their grandeur and architectural innovation. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is where the world’s great religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled with each other. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged along side those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away.
Brooding rumination. That’s what people usually get into when they were awakened by absurdity. Once we cross that invisible line in front of our unwary feet, the world falls on its stunned head, and orientation is anyone’s guess. Just as Roquentin said, where truth lies now is in unending aporia. Yet, Camus posits a way out of despair by objectively exploring the Absurd, the topic of suicide, and the dilemma of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning.
George Tanner provides a lucid, comprehensive introduction to stoicism, adapting the history, philosophy and practices of Stoicism from a weighty and distressing academic venture into a manageable and overall pleasant literary experience.
Interesting phenomenon: If you look at the democratic nations today, most of them had raised revolutions, fighting for democracy at some point in history. However, Japan hasn’t. Ironically, Japan’s “democracy” was “imposed” on them during the occupation of the US after WWII…….
So the person screwed up terribly. It may be a racist joke or harebrained comment. And when his transgressions were revealed on social media, strangers all over the world had united to destroy him…….
A kiss that lasts a fraction of a second is a peck; one that lasts a minute is a proposition; and one that lasts five minutes is an act of resuscitation. Similarly, a contact, executed with longer duration is a touch, with shorter duration is a punch. Time, is therefore a constituent of our actions, not a container……
An embellished Torah bag hemmed with the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, next to a photo of leder-hosened Jewish mountain climbers, reminds us that Germany was not always anti-Semitic……
The author expressed his views on an ancient debate topic: If neither East nor West has had any innate developmental advantage, what then allowed the West to propel itself forward so successfully in the 18th century? He guided us to understand the evolution of mankind’s past development and prognosticating the future of the continuing East-West horse race……
Can you believe that Homo Sapiens, once a species with no significance, skyrocketed to the top of the food chain because of our abilities to imagine fiction, bullshit and gossip?
We are average. This is why statistics work. This is why the most common distribution is Gaussian. This is also why human race can work in harmony, empathy can be developed, patterns can be found, systems can be built, rules can be set, and one-size products can fit most….though jeans are exceptions…….
It is noteworthy that the science of genes has once been the main fuel of Nazism. Lebensunwertes Leben— “lives unworthy of living”, this eerie phrase escalated the logic of eugenics. Nazi’s program of sterilization soon turned into outright murder of the genetic defectives. Euthanasia victims were killed, corpse were dissected and brain tissues were preserved for experiments. Ironically, “lives unworthy of living” were apparently of extreme worth for the advancement of science—genetic studies……
