The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch

Got around to reading this cult classic from 1979. There’s parts I think can be ignored or dismissed but at its peaks it’s a remarkable book and changed the way I view narcissism and our society

🧵 Let’s start by talking about narcissism. I’ll give you my preconceptions, which I think are in line with the average person

From Greek myth, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. Narcissism is extreme self-love: egotism, selfishness, vanity

Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America by Charles Kenney

This is going to be a very long book thread about Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe in Peru.
Autogolpe means self-coup in Spanish, an occurrence common enough in Latin America that they have a neologism for it. It’s when a regime that’s already in power ends democracy to consolidate its own power

Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism by Jonathan Rieder

This is a 1985 ethnography about racial conflict in eastern Brooklyn in the 70s. It’s a true story of white flight. Rieder embedded in the community for two years to learn their stories

🧵 An amuse bouche:

“Canarsians spoke about crime with more unanimity than they achieved on any other subject, and they spoke often and forcefully. Most had a favorite story of horror. A trucker remembered defecating in his pants a few years earlier when five black youths cornered him in an elevator and placed a knifeblade against his throat. ‘They got two hundred dollars and a gold watch. They told me, Listen you white motherfucker, you ain't calling the law.’”

“‘The police came and we caught one of them. The judge gave them a fucking two-year probation.’ The experience left an indelible imprint. He still relived the humiliation of soiling himself.”

A few items from Unsettled by Steven Koonin, a sober review of the state of climate science Koonin has impressive pedigree: a Caltech physics professor, private sector work for British Petroleum, Department of Energy under Obama

He’s been a major player for decades

Did a little reading about automating ports

It’s not as much of a slam dunk as you might think. I thought the unions were being luddites and holding up progress but the ROI isn’t straightforward

1/ America does have slow ports, but it can’t all be blamed on automation

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about. Might start a running thread

To even bring up the subject of plummeting births causes liberals to soyjak and go “Oh, I guess you want FULL HANDMAID’S TALE”

It makes them uncomfortable to consider the importance of babies

https://twitter.com/ParkSlopeFlngsm/status/1946075473269637175

There are less coercive measures we can try. We can start with very large tax credits for married couples and then go from there

That first requires the basic acknowledgment that society should place high value on babies

Laying out some basics of human sexual dynamics to refer back to

Eggs are scarce and sperm is abundant. Everything flows from this biologically

This thread will draw from The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, on the evolution of sex and human psychology. It’s old but holds up afaik Almost all mammalian species are dioecious and dimorphic (meaning, respectively, that they reproduce through sperm and egg, and male and female have functionally different physical bodies)