Wednesday, May 25, 2005
ah, the cynical sisterhood
friday, i got off work in the morning (switched so i finally had a friday evening off), so with nothing to do with myself, i finally got a chance to go to chapters. was in there 2 hours, and found great books. the three i picked up for this time: portrait of dorian grey (classic but a great one), simone debeauvoir- the second sex, and laura penny-your call is important to us: the truth about bullshit.
ok, all great books but i went with the bullshit book first. hard to explain. its witty, funny, but a bit cynical (understandably). so far i'm loving it. here's what i mean. these are some of the books excerpts:
*"our era is unique by virtue of its sheer scale, its massive budget, its seemingly unlimited capability to send bullshit hurtling rapidly around the globe. there is so much bullshit that one hardly knows were to begin. the platitudinous pabulum that passes for stirring political rhetoric is bullshit. the scripted, question-proof events that pretend to be spontaneous exchanges are bullshit. the committee-crafted persona and the focus-grouped fad and the rule of the polls are straight up bullshit. the disease/hysteria du jour is bullshit, and so it the latest miracle pill. The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit. we endure bullshit in the course of our workaday lives, in the form of management-speak memos about optimizing strategic objectives and results-based, value-added service delivery. we tolerate bullshit in common life-maintenance transactions, like banking and shopping. most of what passes for news is bullshit, and even if you are so fortunate as to find things worth watching or reading, the content you desire will be punctuated with shills for things you don't need, like ginormous automobiles and toxic faux foodstuffs." and it goes on and on. its great, and i highly recommend it. i cannot convey here all the many great things that she writes about.
one thing i did learn in the book- i knew that when corps. did charity or anything what would help society and would seem "human", they were doing it for PR. but, the scarier fact is that they get to write EVERYTHING off. that's right people, everything that they do in the form of charity is a TAX WRITE-OFF. gives you a warm fuzzy feeling all over doesn't it?
ok, all great books but i went with the bullshit book first. hard to explain. its witty, funny, but a bit cynical (understandably). so far i'm loving it. here's what i mean. these are some of the books excerpts:
*"our era is unique by virtue of its sheer scale, its massive budget, its seemingly unlimited capability to send bullshit hurtling rapidly around the globe. there is so much bullshit that one hardly knows were to begin. the platitudinous pabulum that passes for stirring political rhetoric is bullshit. the scripted, question-proof events that pretend to be spontaneous exchanges are bullshit. the committee-crafted persona and the focus-grouped fad and the rule of the polls are straight up bullshit. the disease/hysteria du jour is bullshit, and so it the latest miracle pill. The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit. we endure bullshit in the course of our workaday lives, in the form of management-speak memos about optimizing strategic objectives and results-based, value-added service delivery. we tolerate bullshit in common life-maintenance transactions, like banking and shopping. most of what passes for news is bullshit, and even if you are so fortunate as to find things worth watching or reading, the content you desire will be punctuated with shills for things you don't need, like ginormous automobiles and toxic faux foodstuffs." and it goes on and on. its great, and i highly recommend it. i cannot convey here all the many great things that she writes about.
one thing i did learn in the book- i knew that when corps. did charity or anything what would help society and would seem "human", they were doing it for PR. but, the scarier fact is that they get to write EVERYTHING off. that's right people, everything that they do in the form of charity is a TAX WRITE-OFF. gives you a warm fuzzy feeling all over doesn't it?
The End of Privacy - Whitaker