Nick Cohen – Waiting for the Etonians, Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009)

This little England, it’s dingy and it’s mean

I’ve flirted with her mewling gods and petty jealousies

These edited-reader rebels with their simulated causes

Their weak-chinned snarls and red guitars I disregard them all

Recommended: Yes.

Niall Ferguson – Colossus, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004)

The United States is an empire, although often an incompetent one, and should embrace their burden, because the alternative is worse.

Though it cuts me to my soul that

It must be America

It must be America

Or nothing at all

Read: 116 pages.

Recommended: No. This is an argument, not a history.  I don’t care about the conclusion, I want the details.

Richard Wiseman – Paranormality, Why We See What Isn’t There (2011)

Not only are paranormal phenomenons bunk, the natural explanations for them are more interesting than any supernatural ones could be.  (And oh, it’s better to know. Okay, I’ll stop now.)

Recommended: Yes.  This is in fact the perfect approach to this subject.

Thomas Sowell – Intellectuals and Society

Intellectuals are often wrong, especially leftist ones.

Read: 45 pages.

Recommended: No. Alongside Hayek, it’s superflous.

Min relativt partiske anmeldelse av Bård Larsens relativt partiske bok om diktatorflørten på ytre venstre, Idealistene, kan du nå lese hos Humanist.

Etter noen tiår med jevnlige oppgjør med 70-tallets røde synder, er de gamle synderne lei av å bli spurt om de angrer, og vi tilskuere finner det ikke så lett å finne entusiasmen vi heller. Selv på den rampete høyresiden føler vel mange at moroa har gått ut av skadefryden.

Bård Larsens Idealistene. Den norske venstresidens reise i det autoritære kommer derfor på litt feil tidspunkt, men det er den riktige boken, og den tilfører noe nytt: Et bredere fokus, ut over AKP(ml) og over i SVs og AUFs rekker, fra 70-tallet og fram til i dag. I stedet for nye historier om ml’ernes absurde eventyr, handler Idealistene om den radikale venstresiden i helhet.

Les resten her.

Evgeny Morozov – The Net Delusion (2011)

The entire vocabulary of Western cyber-utopians, from “Twitter revolutions” to “the Great Firewall of China” is the product of a mythology that has no connection with the role technology actually plays in modern dictatorships, which have found diverse and clever ways to use technology to their advantage.  Iranians aren’t on Twitter, internet access is often more a safety valve than a foothold for freedom, and your local security police would like you to reveal your social network on Facebook thank you very much.

Recommended: Yes.  Morozov makes the same point, but in a more rational way, as Adam Curtis in All Watched Over..: Cyber-utopianism is worse than useless, it actively benefits the true power holders in a society.

Frank Rossavik – SV, Fra Kings Bay til Kongens bord (2011)

The rise and eventual taming of Norway’s Socialist Left Party.  A good history uses its subject as a lens to see its world through.  This one gets bogged down in names and dates, and has no vision, which is a shame, because whatever else you can say about SV’s tortured attempt at finding a third way between social democracy and communism, at least it was interesting, especially in its early newspaper incarnation.  This isn’t.

Read: 60 pages, + the apologetic chapter on their flirtation with Communist dictators, a story that can’t be told honestly without at least offending someone.  Rossavik seems unwilling to do that.

Recommended: No.

Discussing a new book (The Lucifer Effect) by Philip Zimbardo, the social psychologist Professor Nussbaum ended on an upbeat note: “Let us hope that The Lucifer Effect, which confronts us with the worst in ourselves, stimulates a critical conversation that will lead to more sensible and less arrogant strategies for coping with our human weakness.”

I don’t quite know what “sensible and less arrogant strategies” might be, but I do know that while humility generates some virtues, there is also a vital connection between arrogance and virtue. Why is it that most people behave decently? No doubt in part because of the fact that they are decent and virtuous people. They may well also fear the consequences of bad conduct. “The passion to be reckoned on,” as Hobbes remarks, “is fear.” But one of the other main bases of virtue lies in the fact that people think, with a certain contempt and derision: “I wouldn’t do that evil (base, etc.) kind of thing. I am above such conduct.” Some moralists consider such moral arrogance as itself a vice. The ability to understand oneself in such moral terms, however – as a “lady” (rather than merely a woman), or as a “gentleman”, or even as an honest person, indeed even as being merely common or garden decent – commonly rests in part on feeling superior to others. In other words, virtue often depends not on humility but on arrogance.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)

It is a conspicous feature of democracy, as it evolves from generation to generation, that it leads people increasingly to take up public positions on the private affairs of others. Wherever people discover that money is being spent, either privately or by public officials, they commonly develop opinions on how it ought to be spent. In a state increasingly managed right down to small details of conduct, each person thus becomes his own fantasy despot, disposing of others and their resources as he or she thinks desirable. And this tendency itself results from another feature of the moral revolution. Democracy demands, or at least seems to demand, that its subjects should have opinions on most matters of public discussion. But public policy is a complicated matter and few intelligent comments can be made without a great deal of time being spent on the detail. On the other hand, every public policy may be judged in terms of its desirability. However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always  moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up most of the space for public discussion in contemporary democracy.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)

Self-hatred in the West is a strange and indeed puzzling thing. It seems to happen when loyalty to one’s own cultural heritage is transferred to an ideal location. A common explanation offers guilt as the psychological dynamic of cultural self-alienation, but it is not at all clear what the average European should feel guilty for, and who should be guilty for whatever it might turn out to be. Guilt in this context is seldom defined, but we may suggest, in brief, that feeling guilty is a learned emotion derived from a consciousness, real or imagined, that one has betrayed a moral principle constituting one’s identity. It might be possible, for example, that some people have so internalized equality of social and economic conditions as a moral principle that they experience the disabling emotion of guilt merely from the contrast between their own wealth, on the one hand, and the poverty of some reference group on the other. If so, the therapy is clear enough: Sell all thou hast and give it to the poor. Some individuals have in fact done this, but it is rare. If guilt does lie behind the passionate self-hatred of some Westerners, then they seem to have gritted their teeth and with great fortitude learned to enjoy its benefits.

- Kenneth Minogue, The Servile Mind (2010)