Nithou

Un essai très intéressant sur la place qu'a pris l'Extrême Droite dans le paysage médiatique et sur Internet, ainsi que son influence grandissante sur les esprits, aidé par les algorithmes et les médias bolloréens. On y découvre aussi l'évolution de ces influenceurs acquis à la cause de l'extrême droite, entre union et désamour. Extrêmement intéressant, mais aurait sans doute bénéficié d'une petit travail d'élagage, certains passages revenant en boucle (on évoque ainsi la même vidéo de Papacito pas moins de 7 fois à 7 différents endroits de l'essai) qui tendent un peu à légèrement déforcer le propos. Mais extrêmement intéressant et montre comment l'extrême droite a réussi à investir le champ culturel sur Internet et l'utiliser comme tremplin pour sa propagation.

Not so surprisingly this was pretty mad, I think I expected something a bit more clever regarding the aura pop culture set around Unabomber.

This was published in 1995 and while it might look like the ravings of a madman, this contains all the moral panic the right / far right and republicans have been playing on during the last few years:

• A will to return to the "good old past" and natural selection
• Society created deviants "looks those damn homosexuals and transsexuals!"
• Society makes men weak
• "We can't even spank our children anymore"
• "The government is trying to edit your genes to make you comply"
• Sex Education shouldn't be taught in school!
• Schools have become terrible places

It's filled with a deep hate of the left, while trying to present a malformed "ecological" society (based on the most violent natural selection), with all the fears you could imagine around AI, gene editing, mass control, ... While it might have looked crazy in 1995, this is the exact same discourse that is going on in the Trump & consorts circles nowadays.

Sure there are some (very) rare observations about the impact of work on our well being, but those small observations are drowned inside a maelstrom of unfinished thoughts tackling society as a whole without really any understanding. This book has the pretense of intellectualism but doesn't hold in the details.

I think I'll close by one of the rare quote that hit me as containing a semblance of truth:

"It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.

As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently."

Written in the wake of the (sadly) first Trump election, this book gives keys on how to resist in an age of rising tyranny. When the far right is rising a bit everywhere, I feel such books are vital into not giving up, and while it might be hard to keep hope, it also give some paths to explore on how to resist and face those rising dangers for our democracies.

Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.

Nouvelle résurrection de la pop-psycho, je me suis enfin attaqué à ces 5 langages de l'amour.

Si le propos de base pouvait être intéressant (et tiendrait honnêtement en 3 pages), ce livre m'a laissé une impression d'être plongé dans un manuel du couple datant d'il y a bien 60 ans (ou bien c'est la conception hétérosexuelle du couple?) quand pour exprimer pourquoi il aime sa femme un des maris cités répond : "Je me suis toujours senti aimé d'elle, Dr Chapman. Elle est la meilleure ménagère qui soit. C'est une excellente cuisinière. Elle prend grand soin de mes vêtements ; ils sont toujours propres et bien repassés. Elle s'occupe admirablement des enfants. Je sais qu'elle m'aime."

Tout le livre est du même acabit. Là où les femmes citées semblent parler de sentiments et d'amour, tous les hommes cités n'évoquent leurs femmes qu'à travers les tâches ménagères accomplies.

Donc contentez vous de la page Wikipédia pour apprendre les langes de l'amour, ce sera du temps gagné: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Love_Languages

I had never heard about this book before a fan mentioned it in my Mastodon timeline. The foreword by Gabriel Garcia Marques was already a great promise and I must admit I fell in love with this book atmosphere and writing. There is something eery and hard to describe in Pedros Paramos, the way the events chronology is fragmented, how you can’t be sure about whom you’re reading until the end of the paragraphs,…

This is one of the rare books I will want to reread because of its uniqueness and to delve deeper into its setting. A wonderful piece.

J’ai du passer à côté de quelque chose mais j’avoue ne pas comprendre les critiques dithyrambiques que j’ai pu entendre sur ce livre tellement je me suis ennuyé.

Certes la galerie de personnages est intéressante mais tellement extrême et grotesque dans ses attitudes, discours et réactions que je n’ai pas vraiment réussi à m’accrocher.

La fin m’a surpris mais elle arrive de manière extrêmement brutale en regard du reste du récit.

Assez aligne avec cette critique: https://pauledelblog.fr/2022/01/18/lecture-agitee-de-l-idiot-de-dostoievski/

Une belle bouffée d'air frais dans cette défense de l'oisiveté, du calme, de la paresse réparatrice, de penser autrement qu'à travers le prisme du travail et de l'exploitation, de réapprendre à vivre pour la beauté de la vie elle même, pour nous.

Désormais, le travail ne nous définira plus. Hors de question ! Et à la demande banale: que faites-vous dans la vie? (sous-entendu quel est votre job ? histoire de vous situer infailliblement sur l'échelle sociale et de réagir en conséquence), nous répondrons joyeusement: mille choses dont certaines d'une inutilité totale! et aucune qui nous tient en laisse !

Désormais, nous ne regarderons plus le travail comme constituant le seul espace où se nouent les liens sociaux.

Désormais, le travail ne favorisera ni n'abaissera personne. Fini ! Fini ! Fini !

J'avoue avoir un peu de mal avec les dernières productions de Philippe Besson, après l'avoir adoré pendant de nombreuses années. Celle ci me semble obéir aux mêmes défauts que les dernières: un faits d'hiver, de l'émotion adolescente, de belles phrases. Une construction du récit qui devient assez classique pour l'auteur. Reste un roman qui se lit rapidement mais s'oubliera à mon avis tout aussi vite.

"Vous savez, vous, pourquoi il faut que les belles histoires finissent mal ?"

Got recommended this book by another UX Professional. I must admit I was a bit reluctant as a lot of the "methods" to read people are quite flimsy, but this book does a good job of aggregating them and explain that we shouldn't base our assumptions without a good baseline and several evidences pointing at the same direction.

I was a bit deceived by the last chapters focused a lot on the MBTI which is really not that great at all (https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless). Having ADHD it also bothers me a lot that several physical manifestations of it could be badly identified for people not used to neuro atypic profiles.

Énorme coup de cœur pour cette relecture de la Passion du Christ par Amélie Nothomb, toute en poésie et en douceur, emplie d’humanité, loin des fioritures dogmatiqudd. C’est un grand oui.

Tout le monde compte en une proportion si colossale qu'elle en est incalculable. Rien n'est plus important que ce que l'on prétend infinitésimal.

Some years ago I've decided to stop consuming news, at least in the most common ways: newspapers, televised news, news websites, ... preferring to rely on friends, second hand advises found through different networks and deeper analysis.

I did this because I felt being constantly in this "news flux" heightened my anxiety about the world and its course. Nowadays I'm also considering backing off totally from social medias because I find they provoke the exact same thing by spreading only negative and anxious news all the time.

So this book wouldn't really change my mind as this was something I was already doing. However it gave me a lot of arguments for what I was doing, and I could totally relate to the expressed benefits. In a time where we are bathed in more and more "news" and with those becoming more and more generated through AI, I think they are doing way more harm than any remote good. I feel that as a whole we are becoming more and more anxious and prone to a black and white vision of the world, while thinking that we are better informed than yesterday.

If you feel you're getting stressed by the news lately, I'd suggest to give this book and its ideas I real try, it might do you tremendous good!

"The more news you consume, the more frequently you’ll come across confirmatory information, even if your opinions are false. These days the news no longer functions as a test probe, poking holes in inaccurate opinions (as was formerly the case, when there wasn’t much news around); rather, it cements them."

The proposition of the book, to study the impact of television on the population, the public discourse, the general way of expressing oneself, ... is really interesting. I must admit I never envisioned technology's impacts like this and it made me think quite a lot.

Unfortunately I think the book falls a bit short by half of it and start to repeat itself in a loop without bringing anything new to its first proposal. I would also have liked to have the author advice on the propagation of computers, smartphones and Internet, because as the book is quite old already, it misses the evolution of computers and them not just being "data treatment machines".

Still a great book to realize the impact television had on our politics, our daily life, the way we teach and envision the world. Gave me a lot to think about.

"Television has achieved the status of “meta-medium”—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well."

Une magnifique histoire d'amour traversant la montée du fascisme en Italie, la mort d'un ancien monde et la naissance d'un nouveau. Mimo et Viola méritent vraiment les éloges qui leur sont faites, ce roman m'aura fait voyager, rêver, ému profondément aussi à de multiples moments.

"La science n’enlève rien au miracle, elle en parle juste avec une poésie qui lui est propre."

Une enquête très intéressante sur le dessous des cartes de la guerre en Ukraine et le poids du secteur énergétique derrière, montrant les liens unissant les états entre eux et les tensions provenants de ces liens. Extrêmement intéressant j'y ai découvert et appris beaucoup de choses sur ce qui a pu pousser au conflit Ukrainien.

Faisant partie de "ceux qui partent" je me suis toujours demandé ce qui faisait rester dans ces villages que j'ai fuis, les raisons pour lesquelles beaucoup des gens de mon enfance n'ont pas bougé de l'espace géographique et restent encore en bande.

Cet essai, même s'il traite de la campagne française en déclin, peut s'appliquer en dehors des frontières françaises.

Sans jugement, l'auteur explicite les comportements adoptés, les bandes de potes, les renvois d'ascenseur, les contradictions entre situation et votes FN, entre "entre-soi" vital mais aussi source de jugement constant, ...

Un livre très intéressant qui m'a permis de mieux comprendre certaines anciennes connaissances et comportements.

« Ici », on répète à l’inverse que « tout le monde se connaît », même s’il existe chez les jeunes adultes comme un agacement de « tout le temps voir les mêmes têtes » et de se sentir « toujours épié ».

I think the author should have took their own advice and make some severe cuts in this book. It felt like a lot of common advices (I don't know but reading "just do it" advices don't work that much on me so that's that...) wrapped into a lot of American new-age talking (have you tried meditation? meditation is great! You should try meditation!). While a lot of the advices are really interesting, I had a really hard time getting through this one and it felt it could have been at least half shorter and be more interesting (and less preachy).

Hard to rate this book honestly. I loved the main characters duo and their friends, and found the story endearing, especially regarding both evolutions and target. But there are several parts where I feel like this could have been better too.

The ending felt too long, the book could have ended around the 80% mark without changing much. Forcing a sudden attraction between the two boys felt also unnecessary regarding their common story during the course of the book.

The two main characters have deeply rooted problems regarding their distant past they don't tackle at all.

All the story around Dwight's ancestor, the fact that his father doesn't realize the pain it causes and the reason behind is not well constructed at all. Dwight goes in a trauma loop that isn't addressed in the book except by the fact that he suddenly tells this story in a Youtube stream where there's absolutely no correlation except being at friend's dad's.

Same goes for Leon that has deep troubles deeling with his mother's loss at birth that isn't addressed in the course of the book and seem to be a perfectly normal way to react and deal with others to everyone around him.