Perhaps the most provocative statement you can make today that also happens to be true is this: That the words “healthy” and “unhealthy”, as non-experts use them in everyday speech, are virtually meaningless.  Political topics provoke a few, but bore the rest.  But talk about what’s good or bad for your health, and everybody has a pet theory.  And they do not like it when you say, “actually, that probably doesn’t affect your health at all”.

I came across Stefan Gates’s E Numbers first as a documentary series, and here’s the book version.  E numbers are those spooky additives the food industry fill our food with.  And yes, apart from making our food taste and smell better, (much the same thing), and last longer, what have additives ever done for us?  Well, they’ve also made food safer and less fattening.  But apart from that?  Absolutely nothing.

The reason you can expect almost every item of food you buy to be both affordable and almost perfect, is because we’re cheating – partly by using additives.  Regular nature doesn’t work that way.  And even some seemingly nonsensical additives, like coloring, actually have a large impact on how things taste.

This book quickly summarizes the ideas in the series, and is mostly just a long list of E numbers that explains what they all are and whether you should be afraid of them. (Short version: probably not).  The series is more entertaining.  But it’s a handy reference for the next time you’re stupid enough to start another health discussion.

Terry Pratchett – The Last Continent (1998)

A novel so awful, and yet so quintessentially Discworld, that it seems to expose the pointlessness of the entire series.

Recommended: Only if you want to be cured of ever wanting to read a Discworld novel ever again.

Rose Wilder Lane – The Discovery of Freedom (1943)

Poetic libertarianism built on a foundation of Stoicism and bad history.

Recommended: Almost .. but I am unforgiving with history cranks.

Instead of this, read: Epictetus and  Hayek.

Michael Chabon – Gentlemen of the Road (2007)

Aka The Jews of Lankhmar.

Recommended: Yes.

After this, read: Fritz Leiber.

Michael Moorcock – The Land Leviathan (1974)

The 20th century we actually had was probably the best of all possible 20th centuries.

Recommended: Moorcock is a lovable angry leftist, and my second favorite author, but no.

Fredric Brown – Martians, Go Home! (1955)

This novel’s relevance to online trolling and the data retention debate is accidental, but striking.

Recommended: None of your business, Mack.  I mean, yes.

Robert Heinlein – Starman Jones (1953)

If you’re honest, eager and hard-working, the universe will bend to fulfill all your dreams. (Well, maybe not, but it’s certainly worth the attempt.)

Recommended: Yes.

Broad histories of the recent past tend to start out focused, and then gradually degenerate into news-media like ADHD, leading us up to the “chaotic” present.  So with T. E. Vadney’s The World Since 1945, which, having been published in three editions since 1987, has an unusually long such news-like section.  And then this happened, and then this happened, and today it’s just all a big mess!

The early parts of the book, about the Cold War and the end of colonization, have their biases too.  Vadney prefers to explain the actions of states by what is in their strategic interest, (“it was in their interest to” is used so often as to become a cliché), and less by their beliefs.  I suspect he goes too far.  But it’s all interesting and perceptive, clearly the result of this material having been pre-digested by several generations of historians before being summed up by Vadney.

As we reach the present (80’s and later), the digested analysis gives way to poorly written news cavalcades that wouldn’t be out of place in a Wikipedia entry.  The bias becomes more clearly leftist – the election of Ronald Reagan is ascribed ominously to the rise of the “militant right”, and economic inequality of any sort is sternly admonished.  What’s most annoying are the lazy, empty formulations, like summing up the Koreas in the 1990’s by saying that they both had “problems”.

But then, nobody gets recent history right.  And I like the early part enough to forgive Vadney not achieving the impossible.

Hayek was, of course, wrong.  Despite the disingenuous introduction by Bruce Caldwell, which tries to absolve Hayek from having made any predictions, Hayek did argue in The Road to Serfdom that when you take small steps of socialism, you’re walking on the road to totalitarianism.  70 years later, perhaps no country, or at most very few, have completed that journey.  There are many roads to serfdom, but democratic socialism appears to be a difficult one.

But then, all predictions are worthless, except as statements about the present, and Hayek’s description of the deadening effect of socialist ideas on an otherwise free society in the present has aged much better.  This, now, is both history and contemporary: The inefficiency of nationalized industries, the moral hazards of the welfare state, the creeping power of benevolent central planners.  Socialist ideas create stumped humans, who think not in terms of choices and consequences, but of power and entitlement.

The tragedy that haunts Hayek in this book is the deteriorating effect socialist movements have had on the liberal foundations they often believe they improve on.  This is not much less relevant now than in the mid-40’s.

But his decision to project this trend into the future, by comparing it to Germany’s own road to serfdom, makes it unfortunate that The Road to Serfdom is most people’s introduction to Hayek.  After all, anyone but an apologist can see that he got this embarassingly wrong.  Serfdom is a good  pamphlet otherwise, but the Hayek everyone should be reading instead is The Constitution of Liberty.

“That in this sphere of individual conduct the effect of collectivism has been almost entirely destructive is both inevitable and undeniable. A movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility cannot but be antimoral in its effect, however lofty the ideals to which it owes its birth. Can there be much doubt that the feeling of personal obligation to remedy inequities, where our individual power permits, has been weakened rather than strengthened, that both the willingness to bear responsibility and the consciousness that it is our own individual duty to know how to choose have been perceptibly impaired? There is all the difference between demanding that a desirable state of affairs should be brought about by the authorities, or even being willing to submit provided everyone else is made to do the same, and the readiness to do what one thinks right one’s self at the sacrifice of one’s own desires and perhaps in the face of hostile public opinion. There is much to suggest that we have in fact become more tolerant toward particular abuses and much more indifferent to inequities in individual cases, since we have fixed our eyes on an entirely different system in which the state will set everything right. It may even be, as has been suggested, that the passion for collective action is a way in which we now without compunction collectively indulge in that selfishness which as individuals we had learned a little to restrain.”

- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

The word “hacker” has come to have a sinister meaning, but in the alternate universe we programmers live in, hackers are the Mozarts to the regular programmers’ Salieris.  In a broader sense, a hacker is someone whose approach to understanding a complex system – not necessarily a computer – is to immerse themselves in it totally, until they reach a level of understanding where their interaction with it becomes a form of play: Inspired.  Idiosyncratic.  Mischievous.  It’s this playfulness that sets them apart from the merely competent.

Steven Levy’s Hackers chronicles the rise and fall of the first hackers.  MIT students in the 60’s, who rebelled against the IBM priesthood, and attempted to use computers, these massively expensive military and business tools, for their own personal enjoyment.  The mid-70’s Homebrew club, which attracted people so desperate for computers that they were intent to have a “personal” one even if they had to invent it themselves – people like Steve Wozniak.

The hacker culture came with its own Hacker Ethic, which believed in decentralization and a free, non-profit flow of information.  This didn’t last, and it would be up to greedy bastards like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to realize the hacker dream of a personal computer in every home.  But, as with the ancient Greeks, so with the Hacker Ethic: Conquered, it conquered, and today lives in a weird symbiosis with the corporate world and mainstream culture.

Now, we all live partly in a hacker’s world, partly by hacker ideals.  But true hackers are still rare.

When he isn’t making headlines by dabbling with astrology, Niall Ferguson is actually a really interesting historian. He’s definitely ambitious: His goal in The War of the World is to adjust the great narrative of the entire 20th century.  Instead of a story of Western triumph, it was a story of Western decline, and the driving force behind its conflicts was not ideology, but ethnic hatred in troubled empires.

He sums up these ideas in this Fora.tv video. You should watch it.

The history books I read these days are nearly always about the 20th century somehow, (because, hey, what a century), but I usually avoid World War 2.  There seems to be an army of desperate historians out there looking for new stories that haven’t been told yet, but all the stories have been told, so we end up with books about Hitler’s dog, Churchill’s cousin’s brother, and how awful it was in that one particular battle somewhere.  And they’re all about the World War 2 the readers already know, the one their grandparents told them about.

The War of the World is a fine (although speculative) antidote to all that.  Ferguson doesn’t use the word “eurocentric”, but I will.  To appreciate 20th century history you have to see all of it as a whole, not just the bits that happened near the place you were born in.  Ferguson seems on board with that, and while I’m sure his conclusions are debatable, I absolutely love his approach.

The events of the Great Depression are too relevant to our own time to be evaluated without bias.  Everyone has something at stake.  I hate it when that happens to history, when instead of learning from it, we try to bend it to our will.

In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes picks a side in the fight over the Great Depression, (Roosevelt’s reforms were mostly harmful), and selects perspectives and events that illuminate this angle, but doesn’t seem too eager to shoehorn history into an ideological framework.  My problem with this book is that while individual segments are interesting, the whole lacks focus, like a draft sent off to the publisher because the deadline had arrived.

I want to read the book this could have been, about people like Rexford Tugwell and Wendell Wilkie, about the New Deal reforms and their unintended consequences.  All we get is the notes to that book, a few hundred pages of this and that, and then it’s over.

The book’s selling point is the story behind the title.  Roosevelt’s “forgotten man” was the man who needs and benefits from government schemes.  But he took the phrase from William Graham Sumner, whose “forgotten man” was the man who pays for them. This is the perfect illustration of two opposite approaches to government.  Exploring it would make for a really interesting book.  But with books as with government reforms, the result does not always match the intention.

Jeg har anmeldt Virrvarrs bok om den norske nettkulturen:

Å skrive bok om livet på sosiale medier er litt modig. Du risikerer at teknologiene du skriver om allerede er gammeldagse innen boken går i trykken. Kanskje ender du opp med å forårsake latteranfall hos en tenåring som finner boken i et offentlig bibliotek om en femten års tid.

Men bak alle de opphypede medienyordene 2000-tallet ga oss – som blogg, Facebook og Twitter – ligger det en fellesnevner, en ny offentlighet som bruker, men ikke er bundet til, bestemte teknologier, og derfor vil kunne overleve dem. Det er denne nye offentligheten, med sine nye regler og nye muligheter, Ida “Virrvarr” Jackson beskriver i boken Sosiale medier – hvordan ta over verden uten å gå ut av huset.

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