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What'cha Reading?

Tellenbach

in dreamland
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Ramen Otaku: Mastering Ramen at Home

As opposed to the flour used in regular pasta, the flour used by professional noodle makers is finer than talcum powder. It's the fineness of the flour available to them that allows for a really smooth bite on their noodles. This makes ramen noodles impossible to reproduce easily, either in the restaurant or at home, as the only flour you can buy is twice as coarse as what Sun Noodle and other ramen noodle makers use.

The best ramen shops in the USA are merely considered "ok" compared to Japanese ramen shops. There are 21,000 ramen shops in Tokyo alone.
 

Cellmold

Wake, See, Sing, Dance
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Mar 23, 2012
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The grievance culture proliferates, what stage of the oppression olympics could this be? ;)

I hope its a good read, I read a good book once called Iron John, I suspect it was broadly on the same topic.

It's not my normal reading material, I have to admit. I'm not sure about it at the moment, about halfway through.

Baumeister presents it as a long-form essay argument and I don't really like the lack of labelled sources and references, though there are sources at the back. To be fair, I wasn't sure what to expect but I can't gain understanding by just reading what is most comfortable. So far he hasn't turned it into an oppositional comparison of "look how we have it worse", it looks more like he's attemping to move the perspective towards ideas of motivation, evolutionary biology and a shared causal responsibility of both nurture and nature for differences between men and women.

I think these are well-recognised arguments that have been made before and he does a decent job of pointing out that this argument is about preference rather than one gender being better than another in a value-judgement sense. He also doesn't suggest anywhere that women and men should be performing certain tasks or roles, only that there are tendencies and reasons for these tendencies. Here there are the usual suspects, such as male extremity along the bell-curve and a concept of different kinds of social interactions (on average) between men and women.

The most contentious point is probably how men and women differ in their socialisation, with women being more apt towards intimate, personal relationships that are better for fostering emotional and psychological well-being and men being more drawn towards superficial, but extensive, groupings that work better for a competition of ideas. I'm probably over-simplfying a bit, though.

But the basis is how this relationship results in the abstaction of culture, as a system, and how that exploits the extremity of men by making use of their disposability in the reproductive cycle of the species.

I think the best thing here is to just quote his statement at the start of the book:

Before we get started, lets clear up a few things. This book is not against women. It is not even particularly in favour of men. Along the way I will have various, mostly positive things to say about both genders, but those are not the main point. One core interest of the book is to examine how culture exploits men. This does not mean I am denying that culture exploits women too. Many cultures exploit women, some more than others, and sometimes cruelly.

This is not a book based on personal experience. It is certainly not a complaint. I don't regard myself as a victim, either of women or of culture. Women have been good to me, with a few minor exceptions. Culture has been good to me also, also with a few minor exceptions.
Nor is this book a pitch to gain victim status for men. The modern widespread eagerness to claim victim status for one's own group makes me ill. If you read this book and end up thinking the main point was that men instead of women should be considered victims, or even assume this status alongside women, then you have completely missed my point, and I have failed to get my message across.

I don't want to be on anybody's side.
 

Lark

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Joined
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Messages
29,569
It's not my normal reading material, I have to admit. I'm not sure about it at the moment, about halfway through.

Baumeister presents it as a long-form essay argument and I don't really like the lack of labelled sources and references, though there are sources at the back. To be fair, I wasn't sure what to expect but I can't gain understanding by just reading what is most comfortable. So far he hasn't turned it into an oppositional comparison of "look how we have it worse", it looks more like he's attemping to move the perspective towards ideas of motivation, evolutionary biology and a shared causal responsibility of both nurture and nature for differences between men and women.

I think these are well-recognised arguments that have been made before and he does a decent job of pointing out that this argument is about preference rather than one gender being better than another in a value-judgement sense. He also doesn't suggest anywhere that women and men should be performing certain tasks or roles, only that there are tendencies and reasons for these tendencies. Here there are the usual suspects, such as male extremity along the bell-curve and a concept of different kinds of social interactions (on average) between men and women.

The most contentious point is probably how men and women differ in their socialisation, with women being more apt towards intimate, personal relationships that are better for fostering emotional and psychological well-being and men being more drawn towards superficial, but extensive, groupings that work better for a competition of ideas. I'm probably over-simplfying a bit, though.

But the basis is how this relationship results in the abstaction of culture, as a system, and how that exploits the extremity of men by making use of their disposability in the reproductive cycle of the species.

I think the best thing here is to just quote his statement at the start of the book:

Before we get started, lets clear up a few things. This book is not against women. It is not even particularly in favour of men. Along the way I will have various, mostly positive things to say about both genders, but those are not the main point. One core interest of the book is to examine how culture exploits men. This does not mean I am denying that culture exploits women too. Many cultures exploit women, some more than others, and sometimes cruelly.

This is not a book based on personal experience. It is certainly not a complaint. I don't regard myself as a victim, either of women or of culture. Women have been good to me, with a few minor exceptions. Culture has been good to me also, also with a few minor exceptions.
Nor is this book a pitch to gain victim status for men. The modern widespread eagerness to claim victim status for one's own group makes me ill. If you read this book and end up thinking the main point was that men instead of women should be considered victims, or even assume this status alongside women, then you have completely missed my point, and I have failed to get my message across.

I don't want to be on anybody's side.

I'm sure there is a sexual division of labour but most of the time I'm inclined to think that Marx and Engel's assessment in the Communist Manifesto that capitalism was wiping out and standardizing all individuals of either sex was spot on, I like some feminist ideas and utopias but in the main I think class is more of an issue than sex, at least in the first world/western world.
 

Tina&Jane

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Currently reading The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang. Planning on reading The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker after.
 

The Cat

Just a Cat who hangs out at the Crossroads
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Taking a master course on Herbology hoping to leverage waht I learn in the course and the practice to use herbology competently enough to leverage it in getting a job as this esoteric store I know they want herbs, crystals, or cards, knowledge Ill be good to get in with herbs
 

Neal Caffreynated

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The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and WWII by Lynn H. Nicholas - for college. It's really interesting especially because Ive got to write a paper on Nazi looted art
 

ceecee

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The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and WWII by Lynn H. Nicholas - for college. It's really interesting especially because Ive got to write a paper on Nazi looted art

I was reading something the other day that they found a painting the Nazi's stole in a NY museum. These seem to crop up every year or so.
 

Neal Caffreynated

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I was reading something the other day that they found a painting the Nazi's stole in a NY museum. These seem to crop up every year or so.

Yeah I heard of this too! Its surprising how these discoveries are made so many years after WWII - like when the FBI rediscovered the large collection of art looted by German art dealer Gurlitt a few years ago.

It must be really cool to find art that have been stolen or lost for so many years
 

cascadeco

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Reading Book 5 of the 'lightbringer' series by Brent Weeks.

Also just a handful of pages into 'Lincoln and the Bardo', by George Saunders. I think it'll prove to be very...different.
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Up the Wolves
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Reading Book 5 of the 'lightbringer' series by Brent Weeks.

Also just a handful of pages into 'Lincoln and the Bardo', by George Saunders. I think it'll prove to be very...different.

Have you ever read "Pastoralia"? I was thinking of getting "Civil War Land in Bad Decline" last week since i enjoyed "Pastoralia" so much.
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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I have not heard of it. This is my first read by Saunders.

I just liked the fantastical, satirical exaggeration of the stories in the collection. There was a short story about a theme park where people would live like cavemen, for instance. I don't just mean dress up like cavemen, I mean, wear prosthetics and actually live in caves, with the expectation that they behave in a period appropriate way at all times. And there was another land in the theme park with a wise old hermit who got laid off.
 

Lark

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Yeah I heard of this too! Its surprising how these discoveries are made so many years after WWII - like when the FBI rediscovered the large collection of art looted by German art dealer Gurlitt a few years ago.

It must be really cool to find art that have been stolen or lost for so many years

Well, I remember talking to someone about a painting hanging in an old Jesuit building in Dublin once and wondering about its age and value, turned out it was a valuable lost Rembrandt or something and it was just sitting in a dusty hallway! No one knew anything about it but my drawing attention to it had prompted someone to get it evaluated, I think they sold it for fund raising after that.
 

Lark

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I just liked the fantastical, satirical exaggeration of the stories in the collection. There was a short story about a theme park where people would live like cavemen, for instance. I don't just mean dress up like cavemen, I mean, wear prosthetics and actually live in caves, with the expectation that they behave in a period appropriate way at all times. And there was another land in the theme park with a wise old hermit who got laid off.

I read that, I liked some of the premises for a bit but then I thought it dragged in for the remainder of the book.

That whole theme park and the existences people lived in this bizarre subsistence labour force was madness.
 

Schrödinger's Name

Blessed With A Curse
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The misconception(/misunderstanding?)
psychotherapie

A book, that criticizes psychotherapy. This is exactly what I was looking for. Now I can make my teachers mad, I am ready to fight.
 

Hermit of the Forest

Greetings humans • Hunting
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1200x630wf.png
 

The Cat

Just a Cat who hangs out at the Crossroads
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The misconception(/misunderstanding?)
psychotherapie

A book, that criticizes psychotherapy. This is exactly what I was looking for. Now I can make my teachers mad, I am ready to fight.

What about pass?:unsure:
 
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