Sunday Morning Book Thread 03-02-2014: Hipsters Will Be The Death Of Us All [OregonMuse]

"See How Important I Am, Daddy? Daddy? Please Notice Me, Daddy!"

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to AoSHQ's prestigious Sunday Morning Book Thread.

The Tyranny of Cool

Greg Gutfeld (author of The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage) has a new book coming out: Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You is worthy of purchase based on the title alone.

And the Amazon blurb is even better:

From politics to the personal, from fashion to food, from the campus to the locker room, the desire to be cool has infected all aspects of our lives. At its most harmless, it is annoying. At its worst, it is deadly, on a massive scale. The Cool are the termites of life, infiltrating every nook and cranny and destroying it from within. The Cool report the news, write the scripts, teach our children, run our government—and each day they pass judgment on those who don’t worship at the altar of their coolness. The cool fawn over terrorists, mock the military, and denigrate employers. They are, in short, awful people.

The bad news is that this book isn't available until March 18th. The good news is that it is also available on Kindle.

This is a point I have argued with liberals: "Cool? Of course we're not cool. We're Republicans for crying out loud! We're the adults in the room. We're the ones who wash the dishes and put away the toys after the kids are all in bed. And who get up and go to work the next morning."

First Arab eBookstore Launches, Few Arrests Made

An older (Feb. 7th) GoodEreader news item reports:

With the Cairo Book Fair wrapping up this week–amidst controversy, as journalists were arrested for possessing cameras and video equipment to cover the event–one exciting launch took place with critical support from Vodafone Egypt. The first dedicated Arab ebookstore, Kotobi.com, launched from their stage at the fair, bringing several hundred Arab titles from nearly forty publishers to digital devices.

Why they would stage a public event and then arrest journalists for covering it makes no sense.

I thought this was interesting:

According to the Kotobi website (translated), “Statistics show that readership levels in the Arab World are significantly lower than those among other world populations. And because we believe that reading is a key ingredient for the development of any nation, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to play a role in supporting the Arabic reading ecosystem to the benefit of raising readership levels in the Arabic language.”

This is a noble aspiration, but I wonder if they know what this means? If every Arab citizen down to the humblest peasant and streetsweeper can read, that means that they will be able to read books other than the Koran. Is that what the Kotobi backers want? I'd bet that there's a substantial number of Muslim authorities that absolutely do not want this. Certainly this isn't what the jihadis want. Nor their sympathizers, either, I'd expect.

So I predict that it won't be long before Kotobi comes under some sort of attack, either by cyberspace or by physical threats from the outside, and it won't be from the Great Satan, but by their own brethren.

A Tale of Modern Dating

Lisa De Pasquale, who blogs at The Conversation and was formerly a CPAC organizer, has written a book called Finding Mr. Righteous, a memoir of looking for love in DC among guys on the right.

In his review entitled The Racy Memoir That Will Rock CPAC, Breitbart contributor Joel Pollack writes

My colleague Lisa De Pasquale has written a lively Bridget Jones-style memoir of dating in the conservative movement, Finding Mr. Righteous...[that] pulls back the veil to reveal the hot-blooded desires (and, occasionally, earnest romantic ambitions) of conservatives who are trying to balance faith and desire, sex and politics. Along the way, she describes her own journey towards faith, encountering a new religion with each new romance. There's an atheist, a Catholic, a Quaker, and a Jew--and they even walk into bars, often at conservative conferences...Ann Coulter, one of many illustrious names to blurb De Pasquale's book, writes that it is "[a] true Christian story, disguised as racy Chick Lit." It's more than that, though: it's also journalism.

Barnes & Noble - Still Not Dead

First, how much do you think B&N has lost on the Nook since its introduction in 2011? Go on, guess.

How about a billion dollars?

The Nook was predicted to become extinct in 2013 due to market pressures, but that didn't happen, and B&N is still struggling to make a game of it:

Since fiscal 2014 began, approximately 190 NOOK positions have been eliminated both through reductions and attrition...Last quarter Barnes and Noble...controls roughly about 20% of the eBook market, whereas a year ago they had 27%. The bookseller is hoping to capitalize on more international distribution via Microsoft to boost revenue. Finally, Barnes and Noble announced plans for a new Nook tablet to be released sometime this year.

Well, I don't know. I would have liked to have been at the meeting where the B&N CEO unveiled the new business plan to revive the Nook division:

1. Fire everybody
2. Ask Microsoft to sell our stuff
3. Hope our new Nook doesn't suck
4. Profit!

And the competitive pressure will continue to increase in 2014 with Google scheduled to release its new Nexus 8 tablet in April.

Not Your Father's President

OK, so who is the tea-bagging right-wing knuckle-dragging religious extremist h8r who said this:

A society which seeks to make the worship of the state the ultimate objective of life cannot permit a higher loyalty, a faith in God, a belief in a religion that elevates the individual and acknowledges his true value.

Heh. According to author Ira Stoll, the answer is: John F. Kennedy. He discusses this, as well as many other surprising things about the president in his new book JFK, Conservative, specifically that

by the standards of both his time and our own, John F. Kennedy was a conservative. His two great causes were anticommunism and economic growth. His tax cuts, which spurred one of the greatest economic booms in our history, were fiercely opposed by his more liberal advisers. He fought against unions. He pushed for free trade and a strong dollar. And above all, he pushed for a military buildup and an aggressive anticommunism around the world. Indeed, JFK had more in common with Ronald Reagan than with LBJ.

It's fun to read the foam-flecked 1-star reviews by sputtering liberal twits who are reduced to whining about what JFK said or how he was viewed by prominent Republicans of his day, rather than what he actually did. Not that I am under any illusions. I'm sure that if he had lived, JFK would have drifted left and even farther left along with all of the other Democrats, but even so, he's a long ways away from Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama. In fact, I think that the modern politician whose political views are most like JFK, the tax-cutting, big government welfare state spending war hawk, is that tax-cutting, big government welfare state spending war hawk George W. Bush.

(Tell this to your liberal friends, and watch them explode.)

The only difference is, Bush didn't spend his presidency chasing skirt.

And Speaking of Bush, That Dumb Guy

The MSM always loved to portray W. as an incurious, low-IQ dullard.

But:

Bush read 186 books between 2006 and 2008, mainly history and biography. By way of comparison, the typical American reads four books annually and 27 percent of Americans report reading no books over the course of a year. Bush, in contrast, read fourteen biographies of Lincoln alone while in the White House. This was in addition to his annual reading of the entire Bible, along with a daily devotional.

Of course, it's permissible to say this sort of stuff these days. Bush is safely out of public life, he doesn't have a presidency that needs to be destroyed, so it's OK for the MSM to be honest and truthful about him now.

In contrast to his reputation, George W. Bush was a prolific behind-the-scenes reader.

No mention of how this "reputation" came about. Must've just happened, like a sudden rainstorm, all of a sudden, poof, there it is.

In another surprise, Bush read both liberal and conservative authors without appearing to discriminate.

What with us going on and on about what a close-minded dullard W was, of course something like this is going to be a surprise.

I get so tired of this crap.

Moron Recomendations

After reading this week's atheism threads, moron commenter 'RS' recommends Answering the New Atheism by two philosophy professors, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker. The book "looks at the the math and physics and logical arguments advanced by Richard Dawkins and the other crop of New Atheists" and answers them.

I notice there's a boatload of books dealing with the issues raised by the New Atheists in general, and Richard Dawkins in particular:

The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine by Alistair McGrath

The Godless Delusion: A Catholic Challenge to Modern Atheism by Patrick Madrid and Kenneth Hensley.

There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew

The Deluded Atheist: A Response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion by Douglas Wilson

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski

___________

So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, rumors, threats, and insults may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as I keep saying, life is too short to be reading lousy books.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:07 AM

| Access Comments