Doppelganger - Naomi Klein

This book is kinda odd. Having read some of the author's other work, I was expecting something with a little less personal skew to it, but I don't believe that necessarily made it a bad thing, more simply I wasn't expecting this style of book. Because this book did not have a specific topic and was more generally about how the author keeps getting confused in the public eye with a woman whose ideals run the opposite direction, the information in the book is a bit scattered. This, again, isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if one get bored  easily on a single topic. There was, as always, lots of interesting information, much of which I'd like to share with you.

- "... sending your child to elementary school without fearing that they will come home with a highly contagious and potentially lethal virus that they contracted from a classmate whose parents believe that vaccines are part of a plot to commit genocide and enslave humanity because some lady on the internet named Naomi convinced them it was so."

- "Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums. Which is why those opportunistic players, the people I've termed disaster capitalists, have been able to rush into the gap with their pre-existing wish list and simplistic stories of good and evil. The stories themselves may be cartoonishly wrong. You're either with us or with the terrorists..."

- "It is not only an individual that can have a sinister double, nations and cultures can have them too. Many of us feel and fear a decisive flip, democratic to authoritarian, secular to theocratic, pluralist to fascist. In some places, the flip has already take place. In others, it feels as close and intimate as a warped reflection in the mirror. As my investigation has worn on, this is the form of doppelganger that increasingly preoccupies me, the fascist clown state that is the ever present twin of liberal, western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its selective fires of belonging and ferocious despising."

- "The horror of a society that flips fascist from within, without the aid of a foreign invasion, lies precisely in this unsettling feeling of familiarity. When that ferocious force is conjured up to wage war on a portion of the population, there are no outsiders to blame. It's the nice, normal people down the street who turn out to be capable of monstrosity."

- "People living in poor US counties died (of covid) at almost twice the rate of those living in wealthy ones."   Political eugenics brought to you by conspiracy nuts. 

- "In my conversations with autism parents who have gone the vaccine-blaming route, I am always struck by their sense that they have been cheated or wronged. That someone or something robbed them of what they were sure were their neurotypical kids and substituted them with ones who were different and defective."

- "The persistent appeal of the vaccine-autism myth, no matter how many times and in how many ways it has been debunked, is that it gives parents who see difference as tragedy something external to blame. It's not the genetic lottery. It's not parental age. It's the jab they tell themselves, egos safely protected."

- "The legend goes like this: Fairies would snatch healthy, human babies and young children from their beds and secret them away to the fairy realm. In their place would be the magical changelings who are identical doubles of the kidnapped children only with physical deformity or behavioral trickster challenges, like having a withdrawn other-worldly affect. To Wing and her coauthor, the autism advocate David Potter, it was clear that these legends of fairy doppelgangers were ways of making sense of disability. In some versions of these changeling myths, they write, the description of the beautiful but strange and remote changeling sounds very like a child with autism. There are versions of the changeling mythology in many cultures, German, Egyptian, Scandinavian, and English among others. In some of these stories, families raise these changelings as their own out of fear or punishment from the fairy world. In others, the recommended response is to torment the doppelganger, at times to death, in an effort to entice the fairy parents to reclaim their kin and return the supposedly stolen human child. In a 1968 paper, Karl Haffter, a Swiss psychiatrist and professor at the University of Basil, goes into detail about the kinds of torments that the legends describe to drive away the double. The changeling must be beaten 9 times with birch rods until it bled while the parents call out, "Take yours and bring me mine." One should hold it over boiling water and threaten to plunge it in. The oven should be heated with 9 different kinds of wood and the child placed on the shovel as if it was intended to thrust it into the fire. It should be fed on leather and red-hot iron. It should be given poison to drink. It the torments were successful, the stories went, the changeling would be driven out of the house, scurry up the chimney, and disappear back to the fairy realm. In some tales, the real child would be returned. In others, it was enough resolution to be rid of the double."

- "This is surely why the Bannons of the world, bank-rolled by a rotating case of billionaires, love conspiracy theories, whether they personally believe them or not. They reliably shift attention away from the scandals we know about, and that many have already painstakingly proved, and focus us perennially on something more explosive, something that is just on the verge of being proved. The election was really stolen! The vaccines really are killing babies! And doctors!"

- "The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm. It is to spread panic. The conspiracy is capitalism."

- "We were a society after all! That the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill. That we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, not for ourselves. And that we should all applaud and  thank the very people, many of them black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries, whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic. Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long."

- "The people who are exploiters of this planet are people who put themselves first, unable to unself even for a moment."

The Gate to Women's Country - Sheri S. Tepper

 As both a geneticist and a feminist, this is a great book. It was pretty easy to figure out what was happening early on, but that just made it all the more fun as you watched the events unfold. It was very satisfying without being too heavy handed. The pacing was good and the writing was just right. My only complaint is that the author could have completely skipped all the Greek tragedy bs. It distracted from the story, even though I know it was another layer, it was a waste of time. 

I highly recommend this book to anyone who's not a testosterone-riddled-men must-be-leaders type. Well, maybe even them so they can see what happens when a society is built around calm kindness instead of evil posturing and greed. 

Tricked - Kevin Hearne (The Iron Druid Chronicles, Bk. 4)

 This book felt a little like a filler, still fun, just didn't seem to progress the overall story much. 

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

 This book was very obviously written in the era of paid-per-word. I could re-write this book and it would be a quarter of the length while losing none of the story. I think I could honestly make it more dynamic too. Overall, very, very mid. If written today, it wouldn't even get into print. 

- "And have you noticed, Rodion Romanovich, that in our Petersburg circles if two clever men meet who are not intimate but respect each other, like you and me, it takes them half an hour before they can find a subject for conversation. They are dumb. They sit opposite each other and feel awkward."  Ha ha ha! 19th century description of autistic people

Analyze People with Dark Psychology - Charlie Kain

If you legitimately want to understand people, this book was a joke. It's full of neurotypical, sexist commentary, ideas and phrasing. It's very obviously dated and was written like a "how-to" book for aliens to understand non-verbal communication (or maybe neckbeard, basement dwellers). It was stilted and weirdly written. I think it would be useful for someone who wanted to be an actor on the stage or someone just starting out in their acting career, but as far as real world understanding of your fellow humans, nah. You can skip this one. 

The Unthinkable: Who Survives when Disaster strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley

 EVEYRONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!!

This is an amazing book, well written and honest, but most of all the information contained in it is invaluable to anyone caught in a disaster. The author uses a wide variety of examples to detail how people don't seem to behave in the ways media is so convinced they should portray them. 

A lot of it comes down to people denying there's something wrong for way too long, not taking decisive steps once they admit there's a serious problem, and all around not knowing what to do because your brain basically short-circuits thinking capabilities during an event. The answer to this problem is practice, so that when the time comes, you don't have to think, you already have been taught what to do. Take running fire drills seriously, pay attention to the airline safety video/read the safety pamphlet, take an evasive driving course, practice shooting your gun repeatedly, research evacuation routes before you need them, walk up the stairs when first going to your hotel room, etc. This is all advice you've been given before and stuff any adult technically knows, but so few people actually follow it. I believe the power of this book is that it drives home the importance of these lessons. 

- " In 1990, the national hurricane center could predict the path of a hurricane only about 24 hours in advance, now it can do so 72 hours beforehand.  That forecasting ability gives politicians and the public precious time to push through the denial phase and decide whether and how to evacuate. . . These warnings . . . will only help us if we can trust them."

- " As I write this, trust has never been more endangered. If I had to predict the future, I'd say more people will die from distrust than disasters in the next 50 year, unless we make major changes, individually and collectively. . . In many way, the pandemic was like a dressed rehearsal for climate change. Both require that countries respond collectively in a coordinated way at an unprecedented scale."

- "During the covid-19 pandemic, we were inundated with nonsense data. Too many news outlets routinely published the number of new cases or deaths without telling us how that number compared with the week or month before. . . It was maddeningly difficult to get a sense of relative risk."

- " 'This my the the largest public information mess I've ever witnessed, he said quietly. 'It just breaks my heart. We know how to do emergency planning than anyone on earth and it's NOT there!' " A quote from an extremely talented public information specialist about the US's covid response. 

- "Way back on January 28, 2020, before anyone in America had even been diagnosed with covid-19, President Trump's security advisor tried to get him to see what was coming. 'This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.' Robert C. O'Brian said according to a later interview with journalist Bob Woodward. It was early enough to make a massive difference in the response. O'Brian was trying to nudge Trump out of denial. And it seemed to work on some level, just over a week later, when there was still time to prepare the public for what was to come, Trump called Woodward and said the virus seemed to be unusually contagious. . . . But publicly Trump was saying the exact opposite. . . Again and again, he downplayed the threat in all kinds of ways, contradicting his own public health authorities and sometimes even himself."

- "Almost every survey ever done on risk perception finds that women worry more about almost everything, from pollution to handguns. On a superficial level, this makes sense. Women are smaller, on average, and traditionally more responsible for caring for others. Maybe they need to worry more. But when risk expert, Paul Slovic, tried to explain the gender gap this way, he ran into problems. The stereotype didn't quite fit. For example, black men worried just as much as white and black women generally did. So Slovic tried other variables. Are women and minorities less educated and therefore more irrational in their risk assessments?  Well, no. When Slovic controlled for education the sex and race differences persisted. In fact, when he asked scientists who study risk perception for a living to rank hazards, women scientists still tended to worry more than their male counterparts. Maybe women and minorities just have less faith in government and authorities. Do they worry more because they don't trust other people? But, there again, when the researchers controlled for such attitudes, it didn't fully explain the worry gap. Eventually, Slovic realized he was obsessing over the wrong people. Men were the ones throwing off the curve, not women or minorities, and not all men, but a small subgroup. As it turned out, about 30% of white males saw very little risk in most threats. They created most of the gender and race gap all on their own. So Slovic began to study these men. They had a few subtitle things in common. They liked the world of status, hierarchy, and power, says Slovic. They believed in technology. They were more likely than any other group to disagree with the statement that 'people should be treated more equally'." I just want to point out how this information applies to how people approached covid and arguments about fighting bears and so on. 

- "After 9/11, . . . among survivors who were in or near the world trade center during the attacks. Those with a high sense of self-worth rebounded relatively easily. They even had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva."

- "A strong leader can make decisions fast, which is what you need in a crisis. Hierarchy is more efficient than democracy." This is in relation to chimpanzee behavior, but is completely applicable to humans' heard behavior too. I also want to point out the manufactured crisis' we see in right-wing media and the rise of overbearing, obnoxious politicians popular on the far right too. 

- "There were important differences: rescuers tended to have healthier and closer relationships with their parents, they are also more likely to have friends with different religions and classes, their most important quality seemed to be empathy. It is tricky to say where empathy comes from, but Olander believes the rescuers learned egalitarianism and justice from their parents. When they were disciplined as children, rescuers were more likely to have been reasoned with, non-rescuers were more likely to have been whipped."

- ". . . and interviewed them about why they did what the did. As with the WW2 rescuers, he found a range of explanations, but a full 78% cited the 'moral values and norms' they had learned from their parents and the wider community. Many talked about how they had been taught at some point in their lives that people are supposed to care for one another."

A little tea book: All the Essentials from Leaf to Cup - Sebastian Beckwith & Caroline Paul

 A good, short book covering all the basics about tea. Not great for someone who knows their tea inside and out but perfect for the person just beginning to dive in more. (Also has a great Further Reading list at the end)