“The more colour-coordinated the Bookshelf, the worse the content will be”
“I have decided to do some investigation into photos of Bugwoman bookshelves, or #Bookshelfies as these vacuous NPCs call them”
This Thread was first posted by Mencius Moldbugman
Mencius Moldbugman’s Iron Rule of Bookshelves: The more colour-coordinated the bookshelf, the worse the content will be.
Real readers read books to learn, Bugpeople use books as decoration and for social status points.
Colour-Coordinated Bookshelves mostly belong to “Book-Obsessives”. Most of these "Book-Obsessed" Bugpeople are women. The vast majority of their books are emotional pornography AKA chick-lit. This pink selection is the female equivalent of a man showing off vintage retro nudes.
Needless to say, geek culture and fake book idolatry go hand in hand.
Expect lots of adult graphic novels, Neil Gaiman, Harry Potter, self-help books, George RR Martin.
Don't expect: hard sci-fi, Russian classics, anything written before 1998, Bible.
Aspiring Bugwomen authors tend to write Young Adult Fiction or Fantasy because they think it is easier to write, plus it's currently trendy. Instead of working on their craft they hope that surrounding themselves with similar books will help them instead. Heh, women...
Often these adults know deep in their hearts that reading children's books is embarrassing, which is why there exists an industry for kid's books with "mature" covers in an attempt to add authenticity to their shallow geek culture.
Often these book collections are used as a replacement for religion. When hard truths and old religions are removed from the shelf, expect lots of "spiritual but not religious" whimsy... and lots of Harry Potter.
You will never find anything of value in these bookshelves. Just decor, Bugperson narcissism, and hijacking a once intellectual pursuit for social points. It's literature as a tool for masturbation.
Every. Single. Time.
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Enjoyable thing about places like Iran or Russia is they are only countries who will create longwinded intellectual and cultural genealogies for enemies out of reverse orientalism, or occidentalism. Discussions in civilisational terms you won’t see anywhere else outside the right
Famous example of this occidentalism was the former Iran President assuming Americans read Tocqueville because Tocqueville was the lens his own conception of America was filtered through from a distance
Same kind of endearing effect as ‘The Japanese Version of Europe’
China announces new law to formalise further the project of ‘Sinicization’ to ‘promote national unity’. Few countries prepared to top-down systematically integrate their minorities with their majorities like this. Which model of integration is most likely to work?
‘THE ART OF THE DEAL’ has a major flaw in that it doesn’t include a chapter on securing deals by threatening to drop missiles on people if they don’t accept your deals. Hopefully new editions of the book will fix this - it’s a very powerful and underused negotiating technique
Sense of it being done out of ‘completionism’ rather than any particular ideological commitment. You know like when you want to 100% a video game, collect all the collectibles and unlock all the achievements... In many ways a more noble sentiment than ‘ideology’ in-and-of-itself
Cuba in a very very enshittified state and ripe for upheaval as below but I don’t think ‘regime change’ will come internally, whole place is too lethargic - needs a big push from outside in order to topple. Cometh the hour cometh the man…
Lights are from the infamous ‘Rocinha’ favela. You might think they spoil the view of Ipanema beach but actually in a way they contribute to it; you look out and you really get full-on Brazil, full-on Lusotropicalism all included in just the one vista