Personal Top 10 Books
(1) We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch
(2) Lord of the Rings, Tolkien
(3) I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter
(4) Dune Series, Frank Hebert
(5) The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
(6) A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
(7) The Shallows, Nicholas Carr
(8) Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
(9) Ender Quartet, Orson Scott Card
(10) Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker
Short works
- Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl
- On Fairy Stories, Tolkien
- A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
- The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks
Flint I’m often on your side since the Rogan debates but this is just blatant academic elitism. So many people are ignorant to the world around them, why would you ever disparage the expansion off their knowledge? Harari and Diamond might be reductionist and prone to spinning meta-narratives of history from their own perspectives but these books are not meant as academic papers. You wouldn’t criticize a child for reading Harry Potter, don’t criticize the masses for reading these. I have them both on my list of top ten books exactly for this reason, much less to do with their quality or academic infallibility.
C.S. Lewis:
> Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.
> All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.
> We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.
> The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
https://t.co/46Fm8PdV2X
This kind of glaze-framing is obscenely dense. Most if not all big baddies of history thought they were doing what was best for humanity in the long term.
This is as good a distillation of one of the principal fascist rationales for total power as you could imagine. "They"? Who, the Democrats? I'm old enough to remember when Joe Biden was president, and I don't recall his masked security forces or attempts to overturn elections.
Actually, AI/Robotics will mean everyone can have a penthouse if they want. The output of goods & services will be several orders of magnitude higher than today’s economy.
Read the Iain Banks Culture books for the best imagining of how it will be.
That said, what is the future you want? Amazing abundance seems the best to me.
These are the Twitter/X accounts with the most engagement so far in 2026. I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken.
@mnj76371374@TheStaad Your own soul is being tainted by the hate and lies you’re spreading. Charlie’s security team and their souls are fine, probably doubly so because of the abuse and derision they’ve been forced to face by people like you
@john_shreds@TheStaad@jonaaronbray I don’t know you but I hope for the sake of all Americans you turn yourself in to a mental institution pronto my friend
The Charlie Kirk assassination made me a Kennedy truther.
As in, I now 100% believe the official story.
People will find anything that fits what they want to believe, despite all of the evidence pointing towards a reality we discovered quickly.
People are inherently susceptible to cults and "hidden knowledge" because we are pattern seeking animals.