4 ms·

I often find when I do get lost in an article, it's common to be something from the New Yorker. The articles are very well written and often explore the story i

by verelo 10y ago

I often find when I do get lost in an article, it's common to be something from the New Yorker. The articles are very well written and often explore the story in a way that is factual and creative that I really enjoy. Reading "Precedent and Prologue" (Gore V's bush supreme court article) I got so interested in the judicial activism concept and ended up lost on Wikipedia for a few hours bouncing around related articles. The exact same thing happened to me with this Mosul Dam article, when I saw myself reading about Gaddafi I realized I had gone so far down the rabbit hole that the topics I was now reading about were only vaguely related. All said and done, it's a good point i really should become a paid subscriber, thanks for suggesting it!

nyolfen 10y ago
it's gotten a lot of buzz lately, including on HN, but if you're interested in going down the gaddafi hole a bit further i'd recommend the recent adam curtis film, hypernormalisation. his films tend to be a bit like getting lost in a wikipedia hole in their own right, though.
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  Seconded Then watch Only The Dead (see the end of a war) by an australian bloke Good luck sleeping afterwards
  - mcphilip 10y ago
    No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1]. The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy. Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought: >We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression. HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist. For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like the golden rule. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM [2]http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385
- Angostura 10y ago
  You have to be a little careful though - https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg
  - omnimus 10y ago
    Adam Curtis does make some generalisations but i am not sure its possible without them. The world is so complex that anyone trying to understand the topic would have to go through same research Curtis had to. Its so hard to make point about global situation in 3 hours. It is a political commentary and sometimes its subjective but i think his work make lot of people think and investigate. That's whole lot better than something that tries to be objective no matter what - that always ends up saying practicaly nothing.

by verelo 10y ago

nyolfen 10y ago

it's gotten a lot of buzz lately, including on HN, but if you're interested in going down the gaddafi hole a bit further i'd recommend the recent adam curtis film, hypernormalisation. his films tend to be a bit like getting lost in a wikipedia hole in their own right, though.

emp_zealoth 10y ago
Seconded Then watch Only The Dead (see the end of a war) by an australian bloke Good luck sleeping afterwards
- mcphilip 10y ago
  No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1]. The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy. Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought: >We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression. HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist. For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like the golden rule. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM [2]http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385
Angostura 10y ago
You have to be a little careful though - https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg
- omnimus 10y ago
  Adam Curtis does make some generalisations but i am not sure its possible without them. The world is so complex that anyone trying to understand the topic would have to go through same research Curtis had to. Its so hard to make point about global situation in 3 hours. It is a political commentary and sometimes its subjective but i think his work make lot of people think and investigate. That's whole lot better than something that tries to be objective no matter what - that always ends up saying practicaly nothing.