Scattershot fearmongering.
An alarmist manifesto against big government, big tech, big finance, big education, and all the other putative enemies of the private purse.
“They are coming after your livelihood, aka your path to wealth,” writes Roth, author of The War on Small Business. Who are they? The “new financial world order,” which aims to make sure that you lose and “the wealthy and powerful” win. And how will this nefarious cabal pull it off? For one thing, by forcing such things as “mandatory vaccines and masking,” which of course are just plots to make government bigger. For another, by accruing debt that makes the dollar weaker and then ceding American hegemony in the global market, a process that began with the abandonment of the gold standard. You don’t even own the software on your cellphone and computer thanks to these evildoers, who have replaced plain per–mark version ownership with subscriptions. One day you won’t even own a car thanks to Uber and similar companies. Dare speak up, and you’ll wind up on some blacklist, such as a journalist banned from PayPal—though, Roth doesn’t add, the supposed journalist wasn’t shy of saying nice things about Hitler and often supporting radical right talking points—and the Canadian truckers who protested having to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to enter the U.S. In support of her various scarecrow theses, Roth adduces such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Peter Thiel, whose like-minded utterances are invariably “tremendous” or “fantastic.” Her targets are of the broad-side-of-the-barn variety: There’s Amazon, of course, which “wants to be entrenched in every facet of your life”; every institution of higher learning in the land, “cheered on by the useful idiots saying that you must go to college”; and, naturally, every company that has bought into the environmental, social, and corporate governance model.
Scattershot fearmongering.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304932
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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