steve brust writes pretty good fantasy-noir. i got the first couple of his Taltos fantasy series, though I hear it gets a little up its own ass later. he's a huge trot but afaik not a particularly obnoxious one (china mieville is personally offensive to me)
also in that vein if you like urban fantasy but think jim butcher is a hack, Mike Carey's Felix Castor series is good gritty fun. he's the guy who wrote The Girl with All the Gifts lmao
for old school stuff I really enjoy Zelazny, something about the flow of his writing is really enjoyable for me. the original Amber series is a classic.
Although speaking of misery, I quite like the R Scott Bakker books. Very reactionary in many respects, even by the standards of fantasy (misognyny abounds). Although it's also one of the few series that doesn't at all glamourise in any way so some sort of mythical past. But the first trilogy is very well done. Main hero/villain is a sociopathic Nietzchian superman and the setting is basically the crusades. Oh and there are aliens
If also second Malazan, which was really onto something for the first 6 books or so. Just skip the first book outright, you don't need it
Caesura109 posted:found a weird blog
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
https://rhizzone.net/articles/article-review-book-review-manufacturing-consent/
Scott Alexander over at the popular blog Slate Star Codex is an interesting case study in classical liberalism; nowhere else will you find someone who better exemplifies the phenomenon of skirting within microns of the event horizon of Getting It before screaming "Nooooo" and zooming off in some other direction; nor will you find many who choose a crazier direction in which to flee.
While Arthurs was taken to the county jail on homicide charges, police and FBI agents released Russell, who claimed that he used the explosives to power model rockets. An officer even drove Russell back to the murder scene so he could retrieve his car.
What happened next could well have been a disaster. Within hours, Russell acquired an AR-15-style assault rifle and a bolt-action hunting rifle. He loaded homemade body armor and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into his car, and set off for the Florida Keys with another Atomwaffen member.
wow who would've guessed. This is the second Atomwaffen article I've read recently (I think the other was by Der Spiegel that was just run through google translate) and it's crazy (read: entirely predictable) that we haven't been hearing more about this in the Press.
During his interrogation, Devon Arthurs had not only warned of Atomwaffen’s violent ambitions, but said repeatedly that the organization had attracted U.S. military personnel as members and was aiming to recruit more.
Petrol posted:all they need now is to pose as radical leftists when they do their terror attacks and we can just call them Stupid Gladio
imo next to none of them could manage that, because them knowing their success depended on people misreading their politics even after they died would deprive them of the neurotic fantasy fuel they need to pull the trigger.
"revolutionary" action on the contemporary Western far right is magical-thinking-powered, non-materialist and fantasy-based when it's not instigated by the state directly or run through a state-funded arm like the Azov Wicca circle. it's pretty much always ego-driven adventurism, and when it actually provokes anything it tends to be 1) the result of a planned (or poorly planned) operation by police or 2) the stopped clock principle. those guys all have the idea, probably fueled by mania or drugs in the moment, that they're going to do something in real life that will turn out like a movie, or like the great-man version of history they half-remember from grade school or intro college courses, and racial holy war will commence, and as put-upon, self-pitying individuals they'll get broken out of prison or something and become sex gods or at least worshiped martyrs. it's a demented, withered imitation of Marxist revolutionary enthusiasm, where the revolutionary class isn't even replaced with "white people", but with the far-right extremists themselves as fantastical super-knighthoods of like a few dozen people at most, where next to none of them will actually do anything. it's also why the ones who will are so easily folded into dirty tricks by the state, because they have no other constituency except the frustrated guys around them they're trying to impress.
the easiest way for most Western states to play Gladio-style games domestically today might be through their existing industry of entrapping fringe anarchists, since they have the same no-other-constituency and fantastical-thinking problems, with the obstacle there probably being that most anarchists do not know how to shoot or handle explosives because unlike former Troops they weren't taught how to be terrorists by the U.S. government.
congratulations everyone, we did it!
Synergy posted:i've been seeing this study passed around lately as evidence that discrimination is gone in america
congratulations everyone, we did it!
Couple of comments on that:
This is a resume audit paper, so they send out the same resume to a bunch of employers with the names varied to suggest the race of the applicant; differences in call back rates are used to measure discrimination. The point of the paper is to decompose "taste-based discrimination" (intrinsic bias against black qua black, etc.) from "statistical discrimination" (impassive economic robot has no ill will against you, but infers from your name that your turnover rate is 20% higher and declines to interview you). To this end, they use names that they claim are uncorrelated with socioeconomic status (SES), to eliminate "blacks are poor" statistical discrimination. Decoupling statistical and taste-based discrimination is the holy grail of the economics discrimination literature, and is interesting from an academic perspective, but is irrelevant to the degree of actual discrimination. Whether you're denied a job based on personal hatred or bloodless calculus makes little difference to your paycheck. The most charitable interpretation of this paper is that employers don't toss resumes based on taste, but may or may not do so based on SES signals.
It doesn't even show that, though, because in order to avoid SES signals, they exclude names that are "stereotypically african american", since these are correlated with poverty. That leaves them with names like "Ryan Washington" and "Ryan Jefferson" for black men, for example. It's not at all clear to me that the first pass reader of these resumes will even identify those names as black. In fact, those are the only two names they use for black men. They only use one given name and two surnames per category (black, white, hispanic), which means if those names are weak signals of ethnicity, they'll get small differences in callbacks across groups--exactly what they found--and they'll have no way to tell whether this is a problem or not since they have no strong signals as points of comparison.
The paper published in a crap journal--applied economics letters (10 year discounted recursive impact factor of 0.04 vs about 4.0 for a top journal), which gives you an idea of how seriously even economists take the result.
dimashq posted:Should I read cyclonopedia
its a cool and fun read if you're into that kind of thing
Edited by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia ()