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Currently Reading (View all 7)

David Kilcullen: Counterinsurgency (2010, Oxford University Press) 1 star

Review of 'Counterinsurgency' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

Kilcullen's book is deeply problematic, but also a mirror image of imperialist foreign policy. His (and the US/NATO/EU's) approach to "counterinsurgency" is rooted in a conservative, militaristic worldview that prioritizes the use of force and the suppression of any dissent. His ideas are based on flawed assumptions about who the "insurgents" are, but also of the efficacy of military intervention and the ability of foreign powers to impose their will on other nations.

Kilcullen's emphasis on "winning hearts and minds" is particularly troubling, as it is often used as a justification for imperialism and the suppression of local resistance movements. His strategies for counterinsurgency are often geared towards protecting the interests of Western powers (money).

Overall, I found "Counterinsurgency" to be a deeply flawed and troubling book, but to be treated as a manual of the methods and arguments colonialist "peacekeepers" use to subjugate and harm. We're supposed to trust …

Review of 'The Mystery of the Aleph' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A finite history of infinities.

From Pythagoreans, the Kabbalah, Galileo, Bolzano, Gauss, Riemann, Weierstrass, to Cantor. From Cantor to Gödel, Zermelo, and the eugenist Bertrand Russel.

Philosophers and mathematicians, some of them utterly entranced by the concept, like moths to the flame. Some of them completely oblivious a world war was tempestuously unravelling around them — that someone is Gödel, who was no longer a part of this dimension, narrowly escaping being drafted in some army, having to cross Siberia to arrive to the US. Like Cantor before him, his mental and physical health were quickly deteriorating, along with his trust for people around him. This is also one of my criticisms, the author goes at length to put an equal sign between studying set theory and developing mental health issues, which only serves to create stigma(s).

The book also talks about the axiom of choice — the statement that …

Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth (2004, Grove Press) 4 stars

The Wretched of the Earth (French: Les Damnés de la Terre) is a 1961 book …

Review of 'The Wretched of the Earth' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This is a book everyone, especially white people, should read. I read it in English, which has an addendum about how the translator & editor were going back and forth regarding certain words like 'colonised' → 'colonist', trying to more accurately represent the state pushed onto those people by the white colonizers. Even the word 'colonizer' gives power to people that shouldn't have it.
This version also tries to simplify the "1950s pompous writing style", as the translator writes, to make it easier to understand for younger generations.

Truthfully it's been difficult to read it. Some chapters I read twice because of their immense importance and... relevance, ~60 years later. Other chapters I read with a knot in my stomach, especially those that describe in detail methods of torture the French state was conducting in Algeria, just... awful.

But it was in that chapter I learned in more depth about …