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Manufacturing Consent, tbh. Even terrible people can be interesting when they stick close to the facts. Just wish Chomsky would stop parroting imperialist propaganda today.
Parentis Inventing reality is very good
I only got halfway through that because its just so long. Didn’t feel like I was learning anything from seeing more examples of the same. Also I heard Parenti’s book on the topic is better (which I can easily believe).
One I’m thinking of right now is Robert Cialdini - The Psychology of persuasion. Its a really good breakdown of the 6 or so main tactics / psychological shortcuts that we all rely on because its hard-wired into us, but are really easily manipulated by either salesppl, media, pundits, etc. Its an academic book that’s really fun because its written by a prof of psychology who went undercover for a bunch of years as a salesmen in different fields to learn these are, as well as pairing that with a lot of psychological studies, and historical oddities of behavior seem strange at first until you know which shortcut they’re relying on.
Offtopic but do you think we could attach PDFs like we can attach images and gifs? Within a reasonable filesize limit, maybe 15 MB.
Pictures are bad enough, I don’t think I’d want to turn lemmy into a file store. Best to use torrents for pdfs / files in general, then they’re redundantly shared forever.
Phantoms in the Brain and The Fabric of the Cosmos are couple of my favorites. Although, I can’t definitively say that Ramachandran and Greene aren’t communists. :)
Nice, I’ll have to check these out.
Well, to be honest I’m not a huge reader, so my answer is pretty boring. I quite liked Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.
I don’t exactly have a favourite, but one that’s been coming up in my conversations a lot would be the Thousand Character Classic, which is more of a pedagogical text, but it’s great for those wanting to learn the traditional Chinese characters for the language learners out here. I always recommend it to friends who are either learning / re-learning Korean because it makes things so much easier in the long run. The characters themselves are quite beautiful to write, plus there’s a lot of crossover into Chinese itself (obviously), Japanese, and Vietnamese.
I haven’t found a decent torrent to share as of late, since so many are just outright wrong, missing stroke order, missing the poems, or in an entirely different language than it’s catered to (the worst I saw was for English speakers but the entire text was in Russian!). Wikipedia has it, but it’s so clinical in presentation that it’s quite frustrating to go through without the guiding hand of a text. I might just scan mine in the future.
