Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

You cannot shame the shameless.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You are here: Home / John Cole Presents "This Fucking Old House" / Excellent Book Recommendations

Excellent Book Recommendations

by | 53 Comments

This post is in: ,

If you have not picked up a copy yet, I highly recommend Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. I’m only a little bit in, and it is fantastic. It’s such a comfortable read and her storytelling is amazing and so smooth. After just a few paragraphs I felt like I had eased into a pair of comfortable slippers.

On a personal note, sorry for not posting more. I’ve been in a mood, distracted, busy, worried about paying for house repairs, and a little depressed. I’ve been spending time ignoring the news, not responding to non-work emails, and biding my time with house and garden and canning stuff, slipping into a gaming k-hole, and reading and watching tv. All the seasons of Chuck are on Amazon Prime, btw.

I just don’t want to think about these fucking people, and I know in a couple weeks that is all I am going to be able to think about as I get to phone calling and door knocking. They’re just so fucking awful and I hate them so much. Sometimes I worry if it is unhealthy to hate them this much, then I realize only a fucking monster could NOT hate them this much. And so it goes.

Keep your chin up, people.

Reader Interactions

53Comments

  1. 1.

    gwangung

    Sometimes I worry if it is unhealthy to hate them this much, then I realize only a fucking monster could NOT hate them this much.

    Fucking A.

  3. 3.

    dfh

    I get it, John. I take breaks of up to an hour before The Dread drags me back to the screen. Take care of your mind, this shit drives everyone nuts.

  6. 6.

    Ruckus

    John, at least you aren’t alone in this huge boat floating on a sea of rancid, stupid, shit. The only people not concerned and worried are the shitforbrainers that think the nazis were cool and that anyone who doesn’t look like them should be considered slaves, and even they wouldn’t like that the morons they worship would turn them into martian food if they had any idea how to do that or anything else.

  7. 7.

    laura

    So the drop down add on this post is for Manscaped – the things one can learn about on a blog about cats and politics and books and the times we find ourselves in.

    I’m longing for the day when my heart isnt in my throat and bracing for ever more horrific news and being stuck in a defensive crouch simmering with barely contained rage.

  8. 8.

    Mai naem mobile

    Its beginning to get to the point when I see Orange Dbag’s face on TV I get angry. He’s just such a total asshole and a total moron on top.  I want Biden to come in and just do everything by executive order and watch the GOP senators scream murder. Also too, the other thing that just makes my blood pressure go up is the 40 percent approval rankings of Orange Dbag. Who the fuckity fuck are these 40 percent?  That means when i am walking down the street 4 out of 10 people approve of this POS. How? Why? What am I missing?

  9. 9.

    Elizabelle

    I ordered “Caste” when you mentioned you are reading it.  Arrives by Friday. Always up for anything by Isabel Wilkerson.

    Dwight Garner’s excellent review, in the FTF NY Times (but not Dwight; he’s a good one).
    Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin

    …. Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misperceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. …. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her.

    … This is a complicated book that does a simple thing. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.”

    Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste. (Social class is a separate matter, which Wilkerson addresses only rarely.) She does not argue that the words are synonyms. She argues that they “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.”

    … A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”

    …. Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans. Each country “relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.”

    … Her consideration of the 2016 election, and American politics in general, is sobering. To anyone who imagined that the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had begun to enter a post-racial era, she reminds us that the majority of whites did not vote for him.

    She poses the question so many intellectuals and pundits on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests?

    She runs further with the notion of white resentment than many commentators have been willing to … What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, “was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.”

    … “Caste” deepens our tragic sense of American history. It reads like watching the slow passing of a long and demented cortege. In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It’s a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It’s a book that changes the weather inside a reader.

    How could you not order her book after that review?

  11. 11.

    syphonblue

    Books!

    Gideon the Ninth – lesbian necromancer’s in space (the sequel, Harrow the Ninth just came out)

    The Daevabad Trilogy – what if Egyptian and other middle eastern gods were real and had their own hidden city and liked to fight a lot

    The Red Rising Saga – space Roman fascists get owned by space democracy Trojan horses

  12. 12.

    HalfAssedHomesteader

    I can’t wait for this to be over. And I will NEVER forgive these people for putting us and the nation through this living hell.

  13. 13.

    TaMara (HFG)

    I really haven’t slept in over three weeks. Even naps, which are greatly needed, have eluded me.

    Not sure how to keep the various demons away. Except to keep moving forward.

  14. 14.

    Meyerman

    John – thanks for Balloon Juice. In this horrible time, it helps me get through the day and confirms that there are people who are working every day to end this madness. That is all.

  15. 15.

    Ian

    @Mai naem mobile:

    Well over half the population eligible to vote doesn’t bother.  That means is less than 2 out of ten you see walking by that approve.  Still disturbing, but somewhat less heartbreaking

  16. 16.

    dww44

    @Mai naem mobile: Re the 40% approval that LOD reported for Trump in Pennsylvania tonight versus the 46% for Biden.  Same exact thoughts.  How could 40% of the country approve of Trump? It should be unpossible. Neither spouse nor I can abide looking at Trump on teevee.  Earlier today I looked at spouse and said that Trump’s mouth, when he’s speaking, resembles the mouth of a catfish.  He agreed.  That had been bothering me for a long time.  The way his lips move when he talks.  So very off putting.  It really is.

  17. 17.

    HumboldtBlue

    I have just begun Say Nothing: A tale of murder and memory in Northern Ireland.

    I am a lot angrier today than I was on this date a year ago.

  18. 18.

    Kent

    @HalfAssedHomesteader:I can’t wait for this to be over. And I will NEVER forgive these people for putting us and the nation through this living hell.

    Agreed.  And I’m related to a shitload of them in rural PA, MI, and IN.  Next time I get a solicitation for one of their spawn to go be a missionary somewhere on my dime I’ll likely lose it.   That’s what they actually do.  Fundraise within the family so that precious little fundie snot can go join a mission somewhere in Africa or Latin America to build schools or some such.  Then turn around and flood my FB with Trump memes

    One of them did recently bring back a black husband from Botswana so that was mildly interesting.  Soon as they got married they got the hell out of central PA and moved to Philly so maybe the kids are all right.

  19. 19.

    Punchy

    Soooo….Nebraska just going to put together a football sked on the fly and duck out of the B10 for one enormously stupid football season?   Do they know they cant get B10 TV money if they dont play in the B10?  Do they know they have no gate receipts when they cant bring fans in?  So they know that traveling with 100+ players and coaches for ~5-6 games with little/no TV revy and no gate will cost them many millions?

    I hope the B10 goes 9th grade ex-girlfriend on them and boots them from the conference…

  20. 20.

    Chetan Murthy

    I once read that slavery was the oppression of one set of cousins by another.  It is in that sense that to call it “caste” really is precise.  That’s what the caste system was and is in India: the idea that somehow these castes kept their genes apart is …. ridiculous (I’ve met enough coal-black Brahmins, and am myself a rather dark Kshatriya).  It’s all about one set of cousins oppressing another set.

  21. 21.

    dww44

    I’m reading Erik Larson’s  ” The Splendid and the Vile”  about Churchill and Nazi Germany in 1940.  Well written but i won’t get through it before the reserve time is up at my library. Guess I’ll have to buy it.

    I read only at night in bed. But the book has  been a great way to be reminded that history does indeed rhyme. BTW, Goring was truly something.  Corrupt, greedy, flamboyant and brilliant in his way.

  23. 23.

    Mandarama

    My poor sister (sometimes posts here) had a run-in with our first cousin today on social media messaging …he wasn’t mean or rude, but he shared with her the vast network of conspiracy theories he believes, in which Trump is saving us from the CIA or something? In honor of her kind but firm handling of him, I donated 100 bucks to the Biden campaign.

    We’re so tired, and scared. And tired of being scared.

  24. 24.

    Mai naem mobile

    @Ian: I totally get what you’re saying but I just feel like the only people who should be giving him a thumbs up are the ones who have directly gained a lot from him – we are talking top 0.1 percent income and his lackeys. That would have to be less than a 3% approval rating.

     

    @dww44: I think his mouth, and I mean this seriously, looks like a cat’s anus. I also find him really revolting to look at. Not just the Orange tone but his skin looks in really bad shape. I’ve never noticed anybody else with skin like his. Hi def teevee is definitely not his friend.  His skin looks kind of bumpy and rough….maybe an allergic reaction to the tanning ???

  27. 27.

    frosty

    @Mai naem mobile: 4 out of 10? I wish. On my half-mile loop to pick up my mail from the PO Box I pass 10 Trump signs. No! Eleven!! A new flag went up yesterday.

    My guess is that there are no more than 30% Democrats in my borough. And from past elections, if we can pull my County over 34% D, then PA goes for the Democrat. Ugh.

  28. 28.

    Baud

    @dww44: 

    How could 40% of the country approve of Trump?

    When the preservation of your entire culture requires approving of Trump, you approve of Trump.

  29. 29.

    dww44

    @Mandarama: Thank your sister for me.  That’s one of the reasons that I don’t spend much time on FB.  I have enough emails from conservative relatives that I have to rebut. I can’t get depressed from seeing so many friends and relatives, Christians, all, mind you,  worship at the man’s feet. It truly is a cult.

    @Adam L Silverman:  Thanks.  Excellent advice.

  30. 30.

    prostratedragon

    @Mai naem mobile:
    You might try a filter. I use Make America Kittens Again, available as a Firefox/Chrome extension. Not perfect, but works well enough to keep me below the ceiling. And you can add your favorites on the filter-out side. I’ve got Putin and Barr. In all seriousness, it’s not healthy to have these folks mugs sending one into orbit 10 separate times per webpage throughout the day.

     

    Edit: “That means when i am walking down the street 4 out of 10 people approve of this POS. How? Why?” I know what you mean. Gives business errands that touch of the macabre. Of course here in Chicago it’s fewer than 40 percent for sure.

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mai naem mobile:

    Who the fuckity fuck are these 40 percent?  That means when i am walking down the street 4 out of 10 people approve of this POS. How? Why? What am I missing?

    This is what you’re missing. Or, rather, the pollsters are helping/making you miss it:

    Full disclosure, I know Celinda Lake – that’s the Lake referred to in the second tweet – though not well.

    (Edited to fix the second and third tweets in the comment, rather than a repost of the first tweet with the second tweet. Sorry)

  32. 32.

    James E Powell

    @dww44: 

    How could 40% of the country approve of Trump? It should be unpossible.

    Agreed. He’s doing 10 points better than George W Bush when the financial crisis hit.

    The key to his unwavering supporters – and this has been discussed and demonstrated many times – is that they hate the rest of us. They will always say they approve of him because to say otherwise allows for the possibility that we could be right, we could be better. They will never under any circumstances admit that.

  35. 35.

    BruceFromOhio

    They’re just so fucking awful and I hate them so much. Sometimes I worry if it is unhealthy to hate them this much, then I realize only a fucking monster could NOT hate them this much.

    Right there with you,  brother. Right fucking there.

    And so it goes.

    Unstable elements, unstable conditions. Bad combo.

  37. 37.

    West of the Rockies

    @Elizabelle: 

    I will say this. I doubt the people who vote against their own self interests are doing the sort of deep thinking the reviewer/author suggests (“I shall forgo clean air and water to ensure my standing in America.”) Instead, I think Republican politicians have tricked these people into hysterical obsessions, such as with gun rights, their anti-abortion stance, school prayer, “law and order”, etc.

    Of course, what these things also/really refer to is white social power and privilege.

    YMMV.

    The sad truth is that about 33% of these morons are unreachable with logic, science, compassion, and basic decency. The argutainment industry has spent 40 years telling them that Willie Horton (or Richard Ramirez) is gonna get them.

    It’s a travesty.

  38. 38.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Adam L Silverman: predicted response: “Madison is a history buff”

    I have a couple of dozen cousins in the “non-college white” demo. They’re mostly Republicans, mostly church-attending Catholics. The ones I’m closest to talked about trump with contempt in ’16, but I could see at least a few of them being brought in by the promise of another Kavanugh, and I can imagine as many being willing to vote for Biden because white Catholic Penis-American and a return to normalcy. They’re almost all either in Illinois or CA, so….

  39. 39.

    Mai naem mobile

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Cawthorn is the paralyzed guy. How disgusting.  Wonder if Madison(who the fuck names their son Madison?) realizes Hitler would have had him exterminated in a concentration camp because he would be considered ‘defective’ because of the paralysis.

  41. 41.

    hitchhiker

    The answer to the question of how 40% of people can approve of him has to do with things like this:

    40% of Americans believe that God created them in their present form about 10,000 years ago.

    This year (2018) 32 percent of Americans were able to correctly name all three branches (of government), an increase from last year’s 26 percent and the highest since 2014, when it was 36 percent.

    a poll released in January 2016 fielded by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni showed that about 10 percent of college graduates believed TV’s Judith Sheindlin (aka Judge Judy) is on the United States Supreme Court.

    I mean … it’s surprising that we function at all. I taught high school math for a long time, so I know the process of bringing information (and techniques for evaluating arguments) to people in such a way that it sticks. At a conference one year, there was a workshop where the instructor began by putting a half a dozen nonsense symbols on the board and then using them to build things that looked like equations.

    He buzzed through some examples without bothering to tell us what the symbols meant or what the rules of “solving” these equation-looking things were. We were of course lost, which was the point. It’s hard to keep remembering that the things you take for granted and believe are obvious are NOT obvious at all.

    I can remember times in my life when I didn’t pay that much attention to governance. I missed the entire HW administration, pretty much, because I had an infant and a toddler to manage. And I was very well educated, with the full array of resources that implies. Same scene after Mr H broke his neck in 2001 … a period of a year or two when I just had no head space for the minutiae of what W & crew were up to.

    We just have to realize that somebody who’s pretty sure there’s a creationist God and doesn’t know exactly what’s the difference between the House and the Senate and can’t find Canada on a map is not going to have a coherent answer to the question of whether they approve of trump. Sure, why not? He’s the president, right?

    We just have to outvote them.

  42. 42.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @dww44: I got that book for my birthday.  I am reading in the way you are so I am not that far into it, but, based on what I have read so far, I recommend it highly.

  43. 43.

    joel hanes

    Cole:

    Glad you’ve found a way to manage.   I was worried when you were sick; I was worried when you were depressed.

    Struggling with the same problems myself.   Have exhausted the charm of Skyrim SE after nearly 700 hours of gameplay.   Not sure what to try next.

    Reading E.L. Doctorow’s old book, The March, about Sherman’s march to the sea.

    Finished Gibson’s Agency, which I thought was wonderful.   Somehow I missed it’s predecessor, Peripheral, so I have that to look forward to.

  44. 44.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:

    He might be the extreme example, but probably not.

    Conservatives always seem to hate the same people. Someone to blame for their shitty or supposedly shitty lives. Narcissism is possibly a lot wider spread than it seemed to be not long ago. But then having been taught for some time now that certain groups of humans are inferior but always getting way far out front of them somehow may be partially to blame. Look at what, 98% of the republican politicians, those who support the moron racist in chief, and see the results of this training by the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s Faux News, Sinclair Media and decades of republican leaders. Or our glorious president, who has to be daily reassured that he’s more valuable than used toilet paper, which BTW, he’s not.

  46. 46.

    joel hanes

    @dww44: 

    I read The Splendid And The Vile at the beginning of the pandemic.

    IMHO, Larson just stops writing in the middle of the story: he’s run out of juicy bits from Mary Churchill and Beaverbrook’s diaries, so he quits, at a time that WWII in Europe is still at its height.

  47. 47.

    Sab

    Isabelle Wilkerson’s other book, “Warmth of Other Suns” about the Great Migration is also excellent and beautifully written.

  49. 49.

    oldster

    Thanks for the book recommendation, Cole.

    And thanks for the blog. It helps. This thread shows me that it helps a lot of people who are surrounded by fascist morons. I have it pretty good here in a blue city in a blue state — less alienation from my neighbors. If I were physically surrounded by magats, then I would need this blog even more.

    About your book review, though — I probably would not praise a book about race with a comment about loose shoes. Some of us are old enough to remember Earl Butz.

  50. 50.

    MattF

    @syphonblue: I’ve read the sequel. It’s good. Muir is a serious, complicated writer, writing serious complicated novels. About lesbian necromancers in spaaace. It can get confusing.

  51. 51.

    Miss Bianca

    Lately, most, if not all, of my book recommendations have come from BJ. Just put Caste on hold at the library – 10 copies in the system, 90 people on the wait list, I should get to it maayyyyybeee by the end of the year.

    Meanwhile, I am making my way through Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and then cued up is Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Both of these because some commenter here quoted from them.

    Oh, and Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, having finally finished Anathem.

  52. 52.

    JAFD

    Good morning, fellow Jackals !

    I just want to tell Mr. Cole

    that you’ve created a community

    that keeps a lot of people connected and informed and amused and hopeful

    in a world that’s messed up in the best of times.

    Thank You, very much!

    So please, ‘accentuate the positive’, and keep up the good work.

    And remember, what the coach said,

    when they demonstrated The Robot Quarterback…

    “This, too, shall pass”

  53. 53.

    Mom Says I*m Handsome

    Ditto to J A F D, Balloon Juice is a lifeline to many, including this guy.  It’s the second thing I read every morning, after a top-to-bottom scan of the online WaPo (where I hope daily to see at least one member of the Trump crime cabal fired, indicted, arrested, hospitalized, or interred).

     

    Warmth Of Other Suns had some serious editing problems, but the overall history of the Great Migration was eye-opening.  Prior to seeing Ms Wilkerson speak at Chautauqua I would never have been able to answer the question, “How was the African-American experience in Northern cities different than the South?”  Because I am/was/still am a cosseted white guy who’s just barely waking up to the racist nightmare that is our American Experience [tm] — but I’m trying.

     

    I also saw Erik Larson speak at Chautauqua (he was specifically talking about Dead Wake, his Lusitania history) and came away with the idea that here’s a guy who loves researching more than writing, which explains why his books are so ponderous.  That’s my take, anyway.

     

    In the realm of really great books I offer The Changeling by Victor LaValle.

Comments are closed.