Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Book review: Stupid White Men

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After reading this book a whole bunch of things start to make more sense. And I think I’m angry about that, but I’m not sure.

He knows his market and he’s playing to their righteous indignation. This book is full of the kinds of things that make people angry about politicians but it doesn’t examine why or propose solutions.

As an example it contains a rant about how someone had passed a bill that would reduce arsenic levels in drinking water in four years time. And how that means that the president knew the water was ‘poisoned’ for four years. Practically speaking you cannot just turn round overnight and solve things like that, it takes time to change processes, it takes time for things to get out the system. But he’d prefer to go for the shock tactic so his audience can get angry about how they’re treated.

While I agree that much of the hipocrisy pointed out by the book needs to be publically known, I don’t think this book is going to help solve any of the problems. If you want to be angry about politics this book if for you, but it’ll make you apathetic too. The main drive seems to be that theres nothing that we, the little people, can do.

This book is punk rock without the rebellion. And that is why I’m angry about this book.

Next: I’ll be looking for a book by someone I don’t agree with, in the hope I can actually learn something from them. Suggestions?


Categories: Book review, Livejournal, Memories, Source.

/ 20 Comments

20 comments

  1. deeteeuk

    I’m not sure the main aim is that the little people are powerless. There’s tips on how to get into basic government office in the US for example. I think the main drive of the book is that without the general public knowing what’s happening, they can’t do much about it, so go out and spread the word.

    As for the books to disagree with, I’m trying to do the same at the moment. Colin Powell has written some works, and there a few idolising biographies of Donald Rumsfeld. I want to read them, but I’ll only buy them second hand. The bastards aren’t getting anyt more of my money.

    Reply
    • neilh

      The problem is that its dumbed down so far, to the point where it doesn’t even concede there might be a reason for these things other than the personal agendas of the people involved.

      If you take his advice and get involved in that way you’ll end up like Jim Hacker in the first few episodes of Yes Minister, idealistic with a belief in the system to do the right thing and totally under the control of the Sir Humphrey.

      Unfortunately politics is, by its very nature, full of politics. You’ve got to fight them at their own game, not expect them to join in yours.

      Colin Powell book sounds like an interesting idea, I was considering one of the Hitler books too. And Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, but I don’t think I want to buy that out here.

      Reply
  2. childeric

    I’ll be looking for a book by someone I don’t agree with, in the hope I can actually learn something from them.

    I read Stupid White Men in tandem with P.J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell. I found that each was an interesting counterpoint to the other. Both are witty, intelligent, interesting, men, although O’Rourke is incomparably the better writer. On the other hand, I’m far more in sympathy with Moore’s politics than O’Rourke’s right-wing Republicanism. Reading the pair of them at once, though, I had a really startling number of diverse ideas – ranging (in both cases) from the spectacularly well-argued to the most simplistic of prejudices – running around my head.

    I’d heartily recommend O’Rourke if you’ve not read him before, or even if you have: if, after reading Moore, you needed any proof that it’s possible to be clever and right wing, then O’Rourke is definitely it…

    Reply
    • neilh

      Clever and Rightwing are measured on orthogonal so I don’t think proof is necessary… sounds good, I’ll see if I can find it over here, though I’ve not found much but popularist trash (like SWM) so far.

      Reply
  3. stompyboots

    On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill. It’s hard work, but it’s a good grounding in philosophy, of religion, freedom, and politics. And it’s a classic!

    Reply
    • neilh

      Eep, sounds good, but I’m not going to embark on anything that looks hard work until I’ve finished “Classics of Western Philosophy”. I’ve got a bit bogged down with Plato so far so thats slow going. Still, looking forward to his apology, he’s got a lot to answer for.

      Reply
      • stompyboots

        Mill is definitely hard work. I had to read him for both subjects last year, and I think he was the hardest one to read – lots of semi-colons, five pages without a full stop, that sort of thing.

        Reply
        • neilh

          I hope theres an audio book out there somewhere, those kinds of things are so much better when someone else has done all the hard work of understanding the sentence structure. I can only parse a few words without straying these days.

          Reply
          • stompyboots

            I don’t know how they did it back in the day! I’m in no way illiterate, but books like that do find me muttering the words out loud, whilst running my fingers along underneath the text. It’s quite disconcerting!

          • neilh

            I sometimes have to do that for normal text…I’m not too good with words. But having said that, I would say that anyone who consistently writes like that is a poor writer, there is no need to confuse people or make things incomprehensible. Its a kind of syntactic wanking I suppose.

            As a slight aside, I found a Noam Chomsky audio book, which is almost exactly the kind of thing I was looking for…he’s someone I have a good deal of respect for but almost totally disagree with when it comes to details (well, the little of his material I’ve been exposed to so far, hes *so* cynical).

          • stompyboots

            I’ve never been able to get into him, although a few friends are massive fans. Maybe audio is the way forward! I don’t know what your connection is like at home, but Tim went through a phase of downloading audio books from Kazaa, and we were both quite surprised by the range of stuff out there. It certainly wasn’t what I would have associated with traditional file-sharing, anyway!

          • neilh

            I pay by the megabyte (well, beyond the initial 50Mb) so I’m not about to start downloading random audio files. Theres plenty of good stuff out there and when I’m back to unmetered access I’ll be hitting the file shares again.

            The addictiveness of self-help material worries me somewhat – the bulk of the audiobook material out there. But hey, theres no such thing as too much help…

          • stompyboots

            Ooh, but self-help does turn people into Bridget Joneses, which is scary and wrong. Those are always the articles I skip in Cosmo, because they all scream of desperately seeking a man, but learning to love yourself first.

          • neilh

            I’ve obviously tapped a different vein of selfhelp to yours… I’m thinking more along the lines of the classic:

            This is America, you can do whatever you want!

            But realistically you’ve got to know what you want to get out of these things…me, I’m all for picking up ideas of what is possible, and perhaps some of how, but I’m trying to keep an eye on the meme-yness of the message.

            Take the seven habits for instance, one of the first things it says is that you should teach them to other people within a few days of learning them yourself. Its a self-replicating meme. Thats not to say that there aren’t some good ideas in there – I particularly like the time management grid – important and urgent, important, urgent, unimportant and unurgent. But that doesn’t require the selfreplication meme to travel, just the fact its a good idea.

            Such selfreplication is a good way of selling books (and by extension, I’m guessing, magazines), its not necessarily a good way of improving your life – as you descend into a selfimprovement hell surrounded by tapes and books and magazine articles explaining very well how they need to make you feel to buy the next in the series without really helping you as much as they could.

            By now you should be able to tell I’m never going to make a living out of writing self help books…

          • stompyboots

            I completely forgot about that genre of self-help! I’ve obviously been reading Cosmo for so long that it’s warped my mind. Or maybe I was never competitive enough in business to remember all of those. They actually sound worthwhile. Americans may have their flaws, but they are good at being assertive and getting what they want.

          • neilh

            It depends what you’re after from your life…I found them helpful for locating an improvement mindset, they can give you some tools for identifying how to spot things that are wrong with your approach to life and how to fix them. They can be addictive (deliberately so), so you’ve got to be aware of that and not get hooked – I don’t think Cosmo is much different in this regard.

            My current aim is to find some things I disagree with and learn from them some more about why I disagree with them.

            For example, I found John Gray (of Mars/Venus fame, not cabbage) to be thoroughly distasteful in his utter misunderstanding of how people of different genders should try to get along.

          • stompyboots

            I haven’t read any Gray, so I’m not sure what he says. My philosophy is to treat men and women the same, although blokes hear less about make-up and boots!

            What authors can you recommend for general getting focused and self-motivated stuff? I’m going to have so much on my plate next year, I’ll need a few tips on coordinating it all!

          • neilh

            I haven’t read any Gray, so I’m not sure what he says.
            He starts out saying that we should accept that men and women are different, then goes on to put a very condescending male spin on how he thinks relationships should work. I find it quite distasteful, but then theres always going to be difficulties like that – I read a book covering similar territory to Grays classic Mars/Venus written by a woman (whose name I forget right now), that was no better, she started saying that she disagreed with Gray and then went on to put a very condescending female spin on how she thinks relationships should work. All the time there are books like this its no wonder that guys and girls are always having trouble getting along. I’m guessing Cosmo doesn’t help with this, but never having read it I don’t know – maybe I should, but the snippets I’ve seen have hardly inspired me to want to read more.

            Obviously I’ve not gained anything from either of these books except a more dogged determination not to get involved in something I’ll never understand.

            As for what you should be reading…dunno, it depends on where you want to head I guess.

            I would recommend everyone read Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister, its essentially aimed at the computing/technical audience but contains so much wisdom that everyone can gain so much from it. It covers a number of things about how interactions between people within offices cause problems, nearly everything they say is obvious if you’ve ever worked in an office, but they explain why its a problem and suggest some ways of doing something about it. eg, telephones are bad and wrong, they interrupt what you’re doing, they are rarely valuable (urgent but not important in seven habits terms) and it takes you 20 minutes to get back into the flow of what you were doing before it rang. Thats not to say that telephones are worthless, they’re valuable but you’ve got to know how to use them, any boss who expects you to answer your phone needs to have a copy of Peopleware bought for them.

            Beyond that I only really know the books, rather than the authors – “7 Habits” is quite good for general personal organisation, “how to win friends and influence people” is ok, but loses the plot at times (Anna has got my copy of that on CD at the moment I think – among other things – ask her if you would like to borrow it), “the millionaire mind” has the causal arrow pointing the wrong way but theres some interesting things in there about how millionaires think – they’re not overt consumers, which is the main thing that will surprise a lot of people. “Unlimited power” and “Feel the fear but do it anyway” are just run of the mill self confidence boosters. If you’re after money Robert Kyosakis Rich Dad series are quite interesting – but I can’t help feeling he’s on some kind of gravy train with a series that long…theres other but they don’t stand out particularly…

            Dunno. I guess for focus 7 Habits is one of the better ones.

          • stompyboots

            I have heard of 7 Habits, but more due to Dilbert spoofs than the real deal. I suppose I should get round to reading the actual thing – it can’t hurt, and at the rate I read, no book is a real loss of time.

            I’ve begun to feel recently that everything I’ve been doing has been futile, and a waste of the potential I know I’ve got. University shouldn’t be provoking these feelings, because I am actually getting somewhere with my degree, but having spent my adulthood (so far) working, uni feels like a step back. As a result of this, I want to feel that I’m doing something with my time that could help me in the future, and I think that learning how to plan/organise/motivate is the best way to go.

            I still have no idea what I want to do with my life, other than make it more than just a whirlwind of cocktails, fake hair, and shopping. Beyond that, I’m lost, and in real need of direction. I know I’m intelligent, and that I have the ability to be good at anything I put effort into, but that almost makes it more difficult. The fields I particularly enjoy (publishing, journallism, writing) are so competitive that it’s no longer ability which is key, but the abiity to sell yourself, and the motivation to have more strings on your bow than the next applicant.

            Even with editorship of the uni newspaper under my belt, I won’t have enough to get a decent job in Fleet Street after uni, because I currently lack the motivation to get off my arse and actually write/get published/find internships that will get my name about. My mum tells me that to be in with a real chance of work after uni, I need to send freelance submissions and article ideas to a number of editors on a weekly basis, so that people

          • neilh

            Oddly enough the Dilbert books are actually quite helpful in a slightly unconventional sort of way.

            I’ve got a good ten years on you and still don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, you’ve nothing to worry about yet.

            All the journalists I know (which, admittedly isn’t that many) spent a good number of years floating around provincial rags before heading to the national dailies. You gotta get lucky, know someone and/or think differently. If you can stay hungry for more you’ll get further, knowing you’ve got potential is a good start for that, but theres more to it than that. I just wish I knew the rest of the puzzle.

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