/lounge/ Book Club

Social media, Netflix, TV, movies... that's for human garbage.

Read books to improve your life. Not garbage grocery store romance novels or best-selling pleb shit, but important books. No scifi or fantasy escapist trash either. Read books that make you think.

What kind of books have you read lately? What kinds of books do you like?

Here are some books I like:
1984
Brave New World
Fahrenheit 451
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Society of the Spectacle
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Can Life Prevail?
Propaganda
Walden
Th Ego and Its Own
Authority and the Individual
The Machine Stops
Technological Slavery
Crime and Punishment
The Collapse of Western Civilization

Books I plan on reading:
Animal Farm
The Will to Power
The Degenerate Society: Postmodernism And How You Can Oppose It
The Panopticon Writings
Beyond Good and Evil
The Decline of the West
Why Nations Fail
Revolt Against the Modern World
Democracy: The God That Failed
Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

I read a lot of programming books too, though you'll notice that I didn't list any here. Even though it's the industry I'm in, I can't help but feel like tech is soulless bugman shit that is accelerating the rise of degeneracy in the west.

Ideologically-driven books are the most captivating. They're the kinds of books that make you want to read them cover to cover.

But enough about my taste in books. So what do you like? And what would you recommend reading?

Everything this guy wrote, the influence of him on CURRENT YEAR politics, science, social structure, morals and ethics can only be judged if you know the source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper

>>121

Critical rationalism
Realism[1]
Liberalism

Why exactly would I want to read liberal garbage again?

>>122
Why are you against freedom?

>>123
Loaded/misleading question. There is nothing good about liberalism. Additionally, I think it's silly how most Americans value freedom more than anything else.

You're free to be a wage slave. Free to have your country invaded by immigrants. Free to be criticized and hated by liberals, who want to replace your entire demographic. Free to have a lot of competition for jobs. Free to partake in consumerism because your real culture is dead. Free to watch propaganda on TV or in mainstream online media outlets. Free to breathe polluted air. Free to experience climate change. Free to buy unhealthy food. Free to waste your time doing useless shit.

Pray tell, what does freedom do for society, other than enable horrible things?

We need benevolent authoritarianism led by people who have our people's best interests at heart. We need to focus on community, culture, and environment. Not this pointless obsession with freedom.

>>124

You're free to be a wage slave. Free to have your country invaded by immigrants. Free to be criticized and hated by liberals, who want to replace your entire demographic. Free to have a lot of competition for jobs. Free to partake in consumerism because your real culture is dead. Free to watch propaganda on TV or in mainstream online media outlets. Free to breathe polluted air. Free to experience climate change. Free to buy unhealthy food. Free to waste your time doing useless shit

Pretty sure all of that stuff is happening due to a lack of freedom.

>>125
You can use other words aside from freedom, you know. Expand your vocabulary and your mind. Ignore all the indoctrination and buzzwords.

Freedom is dumb. Someone else's freedom to pollute infringes on my freedom to enjoy a green planet that is habitable for future generations, such as my kids and grandkids and so on.

Someone's freedom to come to America and compete with me for jobs infringes on my freedom to be financially secure.

Someone's freedom of speech to slander white people infringes on my freedom from tyranny and genocide.

Instead of letting individuals make all their own self-centered freedom decisions, there needs to be community freedom to grow and thrive. And that sometimes means limiting the freedom of individuals. You should not be free to pollute. You should not be free to be a degenerate. You should not be free to poison public opinion with liberal ideology.

Howmany books do you read per year, /lounge/?

>>127
You should not be able to do this or that, but you can't stop it due to the low foulness of group think. trying to improve the world is a fool's errand based on unwarranted self-importance, better to abandon it and live in the woods as a hunter gatherer -- the way man was intended to live..

>>129
this

>>122
Modern science is based around the current scientific method that was created by Popper: criteria of fallibility.
Modern politics is directed by ideas in his "Open society and its enemies".
Modern philosophy(post-modern actually) is using his critical rationalism as tool to find and examine truths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism_dispute

https://livebooklib.com/torrent/274112

>>128
1 or 2

https://selfdefinition.org/possession/Colin-Wilson-The-Mind-Parasites.pdf

>>135
PDFs can contain malware
I would know, I'm learning about PDF reader exploits
PDFs can contain javascript, even if they don't use exploits that cause code execution

>>136

tfw brainlets can't fathom that not all pdf reader execute javascript
its like my parents a decade ago convinced that videogames slowdown your pc and give you viruses.

>>137
whom are you quoting?

>>138
Some brainlet that worships products of Adobe Corporation.

What kind of novel H.P. Lovecraft would produce living in our times? Bear in mind the information on the occult and esoteric is easily available for the curious.

>>141
He'd be a /pol/tard MAGgAt until his 30, then he'd become a wizard.
Instead of cannibals, niggers, tentacles, and conical aliens, it would be females, muslims, tentacles, and engineered diseases.

>>141
what would he tweet about?

>>1
A lot of these books are simply bad, and the list itself is nonsensical, unless you've done significant prior reading on these topics which you haven't mentioned. You can't expect to understand The Society of the Spectacle (or anything from Zizek), a post-Marxist work, without having read Marx. And as Lenin famously claims, you can't understand Capital without having read Hegel's Science of Logic, and you probably haven't understood Hegel unless you've read Kant, Spinoza and Aristotle.

You've decided to reject respected figures in the history of sociology and media (Adorno and Marcuse for one) in favour of right-wing rubbish. You claim to "like" Stirner but the books you plan on reading show you can't have liked him all that much. You didn't even read Marx's critique of Stirner. You've named only the most selective Nietzche. You've made no mention of Freud, or J.S. Mill (or critiques of him). The only work on that list that's even vaguely critical of liberalism is Stirner's.

To top it all off: you're reading a book about "how to destroy postmodernism" but I can't see a single primary source by a "postmodern" thinker on your list. Maybe because to understand postmodernism you'd need to understand modernism, but that's too much effort? I don't know.

If I were to give you one piece of advice (take it or leave it), read Marx (the Manifesto doesn't count; all three volumes of Capital is a must-read), and dismiss any pre-conceived notions you may have had about him and his work. After that, you'll have some basis to open a much bigger variety of critical literature. Verso Books has "Radical Thinkers" series. Read critiques of Marx and responses to the critiques. Don't only focus on Marx and ideology, but focus on his political economy too, and read up about the LTV and TRPF. My apologies if you've already read him, but there's never too much Marx and post-Marx to read. Avoid work that isn't critical ("unfortunately" this immediately kicks out most right-wing and libertarian codswallop).

>>131
Sorry, but this is bullshit. Anyone with a cursory understanding of the philosophy of science knows that Popper's criterion of falsifiability is rejected (if you bothered to check SEP you'd know this my dude), at least in the form he proposed it. Open Society has been beaten to death a hundred times over, not least by the Frankfurt School. You have no evidence for your third point.

>>143
breaking news: unironic socialist tries unsuccessfuly to get a conservative to read das kapital

Verso Books has "Radical Thinkers" series.

leftist garbage about homosexuality

there's never too much Marx and post-Marx to read.

why are you even on this website? chapo trap house lookin ass

>144
It was worth a shot. Most of the books in Radical Thinkers aren't about homosexuality, though I can't really see a problem with the ones that are (I can't say the topic interests me very much). In order to critique them one should have a good idea of what's being argued for, anyway. A critique of a critique is always exciting for me to see. I'm here because I browse a couple times a month or when a friend links me. I don't listen to CTH and I'm not that big on the weird ironic idpol leftist club, nor talking about current events.

>>145
imagine trying to say it's intellectual to read about dudes putting their dicks in other dudes' butts

the problem with your claim (that it's good to read books written by your political adversaries) is something called salience

have you ever heard the term "work hot"? when your coworkers think one of your other coworkers is hot, but they hold them to lower standards than, say, celebrities or models

it's because the more you're exposed to something, the more you will like it or at least tolerate it

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=work%20hot

so when you read a lot of books about opposing ideologies, rather than just understanding them and not trying to sympathize with them, then you are likely to be converted, even if only subtly, because your are letting those ideas spend more time occupying your brain

no thanks

>>1
Post-modernism isn't an alternative or opposition to modernism's ideas, it is the natural maturation of the same viewpoints. In that same sense, Western civilization was trash from the very beginning and always doomed to mature into something awfully worthless. I recommend not bothering to read any books about either.

>>148
that's why I'm a traditionalist you dummy

>>149
Western civilization goes back to ancient Greece, perhaps even Egypt. It was garbage then and it's garbage now. Unless your traditionalism is pre-agrarian hunter gatherer you are a fucking cunt.

>>150
traditionalism, as in the frontier states definition, which isn't exactly civilization -- just small homesteads surrounded by nature, not really partaking in national or international affairs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier
See also: Appalachian people

>>151
I like how it hasn't been tried before and didn't turn into complete shit already. Because otherwise it would be gay to be an traditionalist.

I'm a futurist and post-humanist btw

>>152

it hasn't been tried before

I just cited two historical examples? are you daft?

turn into complete shit already

because of modern influences corrupting it
the frontier states now have SUVs, TVs, McDonalds, iPads, etc. just like every other generic bullshit consumerist place devoid of meaning

>>154
It's autism, folks!

>>155
All traditionalists necessarily are subnormal in some way.
Autistic, low IQ, homophobic - their anti-intellectualism comes from anti-intellect.
They want the western society to fail because it is way too complex for their tiny brains to comprehend and reason about.

>>146
In those terms, sexual psychology literature is just about dudes putting dicks in vaginas, or something.

>>156
The major mistake traditionalists make is believing that the ideas of the past can be brought into the present with the same authenticity they had, as a carbon copy. They fail to see that the experience of truth of each event is necessarily connected to its location in space and time, even if the truth may be true everywhere and all the time. As Marcuse elegantly wrote,

>The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

Their intellect is able to recognise a fundamental shift, a qualitative shift, but the inability to think abstractly (which as Hegel reminds us is a learned ability) means that for them, mass culture can only be critiqued from the standpoint of a fixed point in the past, a nostalgic point. Lack of abstract thinking means the traditionalist must take a concrete catalyst rather than a systemic one. Little do they realise, this exact thinking feeds perfectly into modern liberal-subjectivist ideology, in which all change is the result of conscious and real human collusion, usually among "the Jews", "the capitalists", etc. Note how in order to critique capitalism (or even Judaism) they'd have to think abstractly.

>>157
Where can I subscribe to your blog?

>>158
You already are!

>>156
Western society already failed though. Traditionalism, being part of Western society, is part of the failure. In fact, one could argue that the traditionalist way of life is the CAUSE of the failure in the same way a seed is the CAUSE of the resulting plant.