Thoughts on "The Chapo Guide to Revolution"

My parents on their shelf when I was growing up that any number of Comedy books that were sitting

around and I picked up some of them when I was older and I read them but the problem with these

books when I picked up and read them was that they were really made for the moment. The one I

remember the most was his book called “real men don't eat quiche” which was essentially this

masculine Panic thing that must have happened sometime in the early 80s and was trying to

redefine what men were women coming into the workforce and more jittery quality of his push back

but they made it funny by having this is what real men are. It was of a time where the best thing you

really compare those to are these toys such as the GI Joe or the He-Man characters that kids could

buy and they were these all hyper masculine things to the similar movies - freaking Conan the

Barbarian whatever etcetera all the way through Top Gun to this is and is Backlash to femininity.

And this is all to say that is book I have in front of me the Chapo Guy to Revolution a Manifesto

against logic facts and Reason by the Chapo Trap House guys is a very much of that same sort of

demode book that does catch a Zeitgeist very well. I think the problem will be taking this book up and

looking at it into 5 or 10 years and looking back and asking what are these Guy saying because

references are all very current. If it was good it was fun to read I enjoyed it very much because it's

written towards me. I’m the audience. I'm younger, male, I'm on Twitter a lot though I don't listen to

the podcast which I think is a key part of the audience since you're going to have to spread out and

go hey here you read this book you don't want it to be just a small subset of the people who are

already listener's I don't know how big that audience is.

But even with that consideration the problem is that there's few too few people who know who

chapotraphouse is and if they do they have a preconceived notions about who they are and what

they stand for. The book can be for people who don’t know who Chapo is. I was reading book

laughing and smiling and the thing is my wife at ask me who is that ? My wife is smart same age

range but she's not on Twitter. She doesn't listen to podcasts specifically the trap house or anything

else so she is going to be this whole milieu.  The problem with the book itself is that it is a lot of inside

jokes but is not going to be expensive in terms of making the audience everyone else.

The book itself is fun to read is interesting is very quick read; the illustrations are interesting they're

good to look at the only work really well with the black and white.  The only real criticism of it would

be that it is more critical of existing culture that it is about laying A positive program For for what what

if you look like and not to be too critical of the Traphouse guy but it is it is in criticizing the book that I

kind of wish they'd written and not in the book they did write so the book they did write was

enjoyable.

If you are younger left wing I would say this is a book that you would read and you enjoy this is a text

for the revolution beyond the Bernard would have won Revolution the Chapo Revolution. Join it; be

part of it; be one of us.

On Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State"

In this book, Mazzucato makes the argument that the state is the best actor to be the one to make long-range investments in technology, as private actors under capitalism are too focused on short term rewards to really be able to focus on real blue ocean development.

In fact, she argues, some of the more celebrated examples of private innovation can be linked to research and investment the state has made. This process of celebrating the private corporation has a way of erasing what the state has done and allows political rhetoric to attack research the state does. Her best example in the book is the Apple iPhone, where she looks at the basic research from the internet to mobile telephony to interface design that goes back to work governments did starting thirty or more years ago. I think as a reader that this example is strong enough to support her basic argument, but she also continues in the book to look at solar power as another example. Because this isn’t as widespread as the iPhone and its clones, it feels like a weaker example, even if down the road it will be more prevalent than the iPhone.

I don't see myself here: Mises and "The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality"

Mises is interesting to me in part because he helped kick off the Socialist Calculation debate in the 20s by trying to show how socialism wouldn’t work in his estimation. I thought Mises’s argument was tortured, but Hayek did put a nice bow on it by looking at the problem of incomplete information.

I wanted to read more Mises without having to slog through Human Action, so I pulled this text. This text is especially salient to me because I am highly critical of capitalism as it really exists. The problem is that in reading the book, I really didn’t see myself. I think this is because the Capitalism Mises describes is a very rosy idealized version that doesn’t exist – there are no embedded power structures that prevent the rise of the talented or anything that distributes rent to people who don’t earn it. For Mises, in fact, even crisis and depression are not part of the capitalistic system, but are instead “the result of interventionist attempts to regulate capitalism” (pp. 60). For Mises, the person who is against capitalism is so because of a sort of envy of those who have been successful – he internalizes the idea that the fruits of labor and capital are evenly distributed and any questioning of this is sour grapes. To me, this is laughable in that same vein of argument that communism will work only just we haven’t tried real communism yet – with that being defined differently by the speaker. Ultimately, I wasn’t convinced. Perhaps I’ll have to slog through Human Action to get at his arguments in more depth, but I’m in no rush.