Showing posts with label 1 star. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1 star. Show all posts

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Liberal Privilege by Donald Trump Jr.

Liberal Privilege: Joe Biden And The Democrats' Defense Of The IndefensibleLiberal Privilege: Joe Biden And The Democrats' Defense Of The Indefensible by Donald Trump Jr.
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

First of all, this is self-published which is a huge RED FLAG that it's horrendously written, edited, and not fact-checked. I can confirm this is the case.

1) Biden versus Trump health. Donald Jr. is correct that the media has not harped on Biden's aneurysms, to the point that if I'd heard about it, I had forgotten about it. I read Promises to Keep but don't recall that fact in there but did confirm it. But okay, Biden has been so forthcoming about his health that we even know about his aneurysms. Donald Jr. is really disingenuous about President Trump's health. We know he constantly eats McDonald's, can barely walk around (forget jogging on a treadmill that's absurd), and lies about everything. Dr. Ronny Jackson is now a Republican congressman, and Republican congressman have fallen in line behind Trump regardless of his policies, words, lies.

We've seen Biden bicycling around, and Biden suffers from a life-long stutter, not mental impairment as Donald Jr. would have you believe. But Donald Jr. doesn't mention the stutter AT ALL in his assessment because he's not interested in reality or educating the public, (hence the self-publishing) this is a lengthy ad in the form of a book. Now yes, the many political memoirs I read were also ads, but they were about the candidate's accomplishments not baseless attacks on their competition.

2) The DNC did not pick Joe Biden, primary Democratic voters did. He wasn't my first choice at all, but lots of CONSERVATIVE Democrats did want him. "Leftist extremists" typically called progressives, have virtually no power in the Democratic party. Biden is centrist, Nancy Pelosi is centrist, as are the majority of Democrats with any power. DT Jr. attacks Biden both for being too liberal, and too conservative, and for being racist to boot. I don't disagree that Biden has exhibited racism in the past (one of the reasons I supported more progressive candidates) or that he is very conservative, but President Trump has definitely exhibited more racism and more recently. So his argument completely falls apart logically.

3) This one is a perfect example of how DT Jr. constantly twists logic. Did Donald Trump Jr. commit treason? He doesn't discuss the details at all while dismissing the entire thing as impossible. Well, meeting with Russian informants to get information about Hillary Clinton is a crime that is dangerous to our country: a) You aren't supposed to receive presents from foreign countries that might make you beholden to them, b) they shouldn't have "kompromat" or secrets of yours that they may use for blackmail, and finally, c) you shouldn't allow foreign countries to influence our elections to their benefit, and I would add, d) Russia is our enemy in that it seeks to divide and harm our population so that it may follow its policy of local dominance over its neighboring countries and world hegemony more generally. DT Jr.’s emotional but not logical stance against this position is that the punishment for treason is the death penalty. No one of consequence in the Democratic party has called for the death penalty, or even really supports the death penalty more generally. The majority of death sentences that have been carried out in recent years have been by conservative leaders who have not issued pardons or delays. (By contrast, Steve Bannon has called for the beheading of private US citizens for merely advocating the truth.) Regardless, none of this contradicts that DT Jr. committed crimes for which he should rightfully pay. President Trump is well aware of this which is why he seeks to try to pardon DT Jr. before he has even been rightfully charged with these crimes.

4) He's right about political hypocrisy regarding sexual assault- something both Democrats and Republicans engage in. Um hello Roy Moore? https://www.washingtonpost.com/invest...
And then DT Jr. also does by not mentioning the many sexual assault and rape accusations against his father and his father's admission of sexual assault on tape.

5) Did media support liberal candidates? Or did media love all the money they made from the spectacle that was Donald Trump in 2016? Did they pound Hillary Clinton for her email server issue?

6) I'm old enough to actually remember what actually happened with regards to Russian election interference. I also read the Mueller Report (written by lifelong Republican Mueller) and listened to our intelligence agencies that were all in agreement about the facts but not in agreement with the Trumps. The intelligence agencies also said there was no truth to the accusation against Joe Biden behaving inappropriately with regards to Hunter Biden's business. Continuing to push this narrative goes beyond lying to participating in Russian efforts to destabilize our elections and our democracy and to divide our people.

On and on, the pattern in this book is the same, DT Jr. attacks Biden or his family for a small or untrue infraction and fails to mention the huge MOTES in the Trump families' eyes. It's infuriating and misleading and it gets one star for making the world a worse place.

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Friday, November 30, 2018

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

From Russia With Love (James Bond, #5)From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

DNF at 50%. I was humming along with this ridiculous plot. A female Russian spy basically announces herself to James Bond instead of actually being sneaky, but I thought, whatever, it’s just a fun trashy book. But then I hit a big rapey wall of misogyny and nope I can’t do it. Life is too short. I’m taking the rest of the Bond books off my physical and Goodreads to-read shelves. They’re all a racist-sexist mess.

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Saturday, April 29, 2017

The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs

The Soft Machine (The Nova Trilogy #1)The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The absolute worst book I've ever read. -5 stars. It's like someone out of his mind on drugs trying to write sex adventures as poetry disguised as a novel. "Experimental" and also a total failure. I feel like the author is just making fun of me for persisting for 182 pages.

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Tuesday, April 4, 2017

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of EgoismThe Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism by Ayn Rand
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Note: Objectivism is deeply anti-Christianity, and anti-religion in general. You should not trust a politician that claims that he is both a Christian and a believer in the philosophies of Ayn Rand. He does not understand either Christianity or Objectivism, or possibly both, or he's a huge liar.

That said, this book isn't really what it sounds like. It's a collection of essays by Ayn Rand and Nathanial Branden that are not pro-heathenism per se. Rand and Branden try to explain how the philosophy of objectivism is that individuals need to think through their own rational system of morals and ethics. That's a good start. The problem is that a lot of the points in Rand's essays are either not logically sound or based on incorrect premises. (And I was pretty bored by Branden's sycophantic essays.) It's like swimming through mud.

For one thing, Rand refers a great deal to biological examples, and she repeatedly gets biology wrong. Obviously, she's not a biological scientist, and we know more today about biology than in the 1960s, but she premises her ethics arguments on the natural world- and her basis is incorrect. She believes that living creatures are driven primarily by continuing to live- that life (and the avoidance of pain) is the fundamental value of the natural world. That's only sort of true. The natural world is more driven by reproduction which means that animals regularly act on behalf of other related animals. Even on a cellular level there's the theory now that mitochondria used to be a separate free-living organism that combined with other organisms (endosymbiosis theory). Her idea that humans are emotionally and ethically tabula rasa when they are born isn't scientifically supported either. These are just a few examples, she gets a number of her points about science and animals either factually wrong or logically wrong. It reminds me of the absurd co-opting of evolutionary principals for political "Social Darwinism" nonsense.

As for her logical failures, (though I'm sure that some American Republicans agree with her) she makes no rational distinction between armed robbery, confiscation of all your property in a communist system, and taxation. She makes no distinction between altruism generally and complete self-sacrifice. Her views on love collapse into such total nonsense that arguing against them would require an entire treatise. She also incorrectly predicted many of the results of capitalism so this makes her arguments for unhindered capitalism look obviously foolish.

I do appreciate her condemnation of people's failure to engage in the pursuit of knowledge and reason. I also enjoyed her condemnation of communism.

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Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Pledged by Alexandra Robbins

PledgedPledged by Alexandra Robbins
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Honestly, I'm embarrassed I even read this. Though I use the word "read" loosely as the book is largely unreadable. Considering that this was such a salacious treatment of the topic, it was really boring. And considering that the author claims to be attempting a somewhat academic treatment of the topic the book is extremely disorganized and scattershot. Terrible.

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Sunday, November 3, 2013

From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds by Alexander Tsiaras

From Conception to Birth: A Life UnfoldsFrom Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds by Alexander Tsiaras
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is a large coffee table book with photography of unborn babies throughout gestation. I really wanted to love it, but it left me cold. It offers virtually no information and the photography is very difficult to match up with my stages in pregnancy. Definitely not worth it, especially with all the great photography and video available online now.

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Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Return of Tarzan (Tarzan, #2)The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Very strange, very racist conclusion to part 1 of Tarzan. If you were unsatisfied with the ending of the first one, this will conclude the story more completely, so there's that. I know it sounds like I shouldn't be excited to read the third one, but the third one is called Beasts of Tarzan so I'm actually really excited to read it.

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