based on the title, which calls men beasts, i expect it to suck.
so i go to amazon to check out the reviews and see what the book is like. i am of course in the market for good books about capitalism. i like horowitz and friends, and they write good books and articles. so i figure giving it a chance on amazon is a good idea. it won’t take long.
so the first thing i read is:
Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009.jesus fucking christ no.
you know that stupid saying “there are no bad questions”? yeah, it’s stupid. here’s some really bad questions.
and asking them not over something like obama getting elected by millions and millions of fools in the best country on earth. which is scary if you think about how many people are how foolish. he’s a pro-terrorist anti-semitic communist, and millions voted for him, and a lot of that voting is because he’s evil, not in spite of it.
but anyway, no jesus fucking christ some govt-caused economic stumbles are not the last legs of capitalism. no this does not indicate that other countries are somehow better at this stuff (sadly they aren’t). no we don’t deserve to die for giving home loans to poor blacks and stuff like that. no wasting billions of dollars on a bailout and stuff won’t cause a new dark age.
this is so ridiculous. these are not the questions anyone good would be asking and answering. they’re a super bad way to look at the problem situation. they are not designed to set up good answers, they don’t lead into good discussion.
This book presents a radically new answer, insisting that global society has only begun to realize its full potential.fuck you that isn’t new. see e.g. Ayn Rand. if you’re gonna be a “radical[]” for capitalism, don’t spit in the face of Ayn Rand by pretending she didn’t exist. jfc.
btw how do you do quote edits when ur omitting something? like normally if u wanna change a word ending, like cooked -> cooks, you could write “cook[s]” as a quote of “cooked”. but how do you change cooked -> cook and indicate it? do u just bracket the whole word? see my empty brackets after radical above. not sure best way to handle. thots? so far this aside seems more interesting than the book.
Author Howard Bloom argues that there’s a hidden mandate beneath the surface of capitalism: "It’s struggling to whisper and rumble its message to you and me. That hidden imperative can lift us from economic crisis, can make us a leader in the next-generation economy, and can dramatically upgrade our ability to empower our fellow human beings." Bloom sees crisis as opportunity, opportunity for the whole human race.the fuck?
and i smell altruism.
and mysticism. and collectivism.
ok let’s skip ahead to user reviews.
I admit I bought this thinking it had been written by Harold Bloom, the Harvard literary don. So I was surprised when I began reading Genius of the Beast and came up against this writer's hyperbolic style, a style which would be familiar to any advertising copywriter.oh look, maybe it wasn’t new after all.
Bloom is described somewhere in the multiple blurbs all over this book as a marketing genius, and that's what I'll happily take him as. As a revolutionary thinker? His argument boils down to "Technology will save us", nothing I haven't read anywhere before.
this review doesn’t explain the content tho. onward.
As other reviewers have written, Howard Bloom's "The Genius of the Beast" is unorganized and haphazardly written. It is also full of errors, stretched analogies and made up word jumbles (secular genesis machine?!?).the phrase “secular genesis machine” sounds pretty crap to me too.
As far as errors are concerned, the book has a complete misunderstanding of biology which Bloom claims helps to explain the cycle of boom/bust in a human economy. I'm a biologist, so these errors jump out at me, and I shudder to think about the number of errors in the rest of the book that I didn't pick up because they related to other fields of expertise. For example, Bloom goes on for an entire chapter about the Dictyostelium slime mold, yet continuously calls it a bacterium (which it is not, and is like writing about dogs and calling them snails). He also has no idea about the biological role of microtubules inside the cell, yet uses their inherent dynamic instability (but a small bit of their cellular function) to try and explain worldwide economies. These and his honeybee and evolution analogies show that he has no understanding about these topics besides what he managed to glean from reading one or two magazine articles about them (including references in the back to primary literature doesn't mean he read or understood them).i’m liking this reviewer! fuck you and your citations-are-scholarship approach, bro.
and reviewer gave what are to all appearances totally legit details about slime mold. that really smells like a correct criticism. and i like his comments about scared of the errors in fields he doesn’t know, that’s a great point to be thinking about. and i like his attitude to citations in the back don’t mean much.
Mr. Bloom may have a modern-day classic in this book. He has managed to perform a work of consilence on the history of man (life, really) and provide insight in the how's, what's, where's, and why's of capitalism and how we treat customers and each other. I must admit as a newcomer to Bloom's work, the first 130 pages left me wondering, "where is he going?”oh man even the positive review trashed the first 130 pages. (and he writes like a total asshole. perhaps it’s not a coincidence that signs so far were pointing to the book being written like an asshole too). 130’s a lot of pages. and wtf is consilence?
oh dear god it gets a lot worse right after that tho:
Bloom provides an extraordinary grasp of machinations and implications of capitalism, warts and all [...] Strongest recommendation!fuck you, capitalism has no warts. if you come away from a book on capitalism thinking it has warts and the book agrees it has warts, fuck that book.
i’m convinced now. book sucks. done.
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