Scan barcode
piker89's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.0
greden's review against another edition
4.0
Nice mental download of sanity in your head, exposing the insane self-hatred in our culture. Some of these examples seem too insane you'd think Murray was just finding extreme examples, such as "whiteness as property" papers, advocating for the demolishing of property because it's "white man's concept" or that "2+2=4" is racist, and insisting that "2+2=5," forgetting in Orwell's 1984, "2+2=5" is an example where the state tries to convince the that truth does not exist.
But these ideas are inside and praised in the pinnacle of America's highest institutions of education.
There is a invisible common force behind all this anti-racist, post-colonialist, garbage. There is something like a cult of guilt, an attack on truth, and sheer obvious similarities between this creepy force you can call "wokeism" and Marxism, which is unsettling, to say the least. Replace "the bourgeois" with "whiteness" and there you have your class that goes to the gulag. So funny, how they don't even hide it anymore that "whiteness" isn't about the color of the skin anymore, but an attribute of everything that's wrong with the world. It's their new religion. And white people... are swallowing it out of guilt!
Most of this is a compilation of news stories and Twitter activity, something Murray has a firm grasp on - the commentary was excellent.
But these ideas are inside and praised in the pinnacle of America's highest institutions of education.
There is a invisible common force behind all this anti-racist, post-colonialist, garbage. There is something like a cult of guilt, an attack on truth, and sheer obvious similarities between this creepy force you can call "wokeism" and Marxism, which is unsettling, to say the least. Replace "the bourgeois" with "whiteness" and there you have your class that goes to the gulag. So funny, how they don't even hide it anymore that "whiteness" isn't about the color of the skin anymore, but an attribute of everything that's wrong with the world. It's their new religion. And white people... are swallowing it out of guilt!
Most of this is a compilation of news stories and Twitter activity, something Murray has a firm grasp on - the commentary was excellent.
quenchgum's review against another edition
3.0
In which Douglas Murray tears apart a straw man stand-in for woke progressivism.
He cherry-picked a few clearly egregious overstretches of performative wokeism and then presented them as though they were the standard-bearer of the movement. They aren’t. It’s all a bit more complex than that, and, TBH, he knows it. In a sense it almost felt reassuring: if the conservative culture wars are battling against a woke enemy that doesn’t really exist in anything like the insane iteration that they think it does, then maybe we’ll all eventually realize that 99.5% of us don’t disagree on all that much. Basically all woke SJW types will admit that the West contributed more objectively positive things to society than *literally* all other cultures combined. But if Murray acknowledged that fact then his entire thesis falls apart, so he spends a book righteously battling a straw man built exclusively by Breitbart and Info Wars. It’s socially irresponsible to make provocative arguments based on misleading and incomplete inputs, and it’s especially ironic coming from someone that accuses the left of lacking interpretive generosity.
Pass.
He cherry-picked a few clearly egregious overstretches of performative wokeism and then presented them as though they were the standard-bearer of the movement. They aren’t. It’s all a bit more complex than that, and, TBH, he knows it. In a sense it almost felt reassuring: if the conservative culture wars are battling against a woke enemy that doesn’t really exist in anything like the insane iteration that they think it does, then maybe we’ll all eventually realize that 99.5% of us don’t disagree on all that much. Basically all woke SJW types will admit that the West contributed more objectively positive things to society than *literally* all other cultures combined. But if Murray acknowledged that fact then his entire thesis falls apart, so he spends a book righteously battling a straw man built exclusively by Breitbart and Info Wars. It’s socially irresponsible to make provocative arguments based on misleading and incomplete inputs, and it’s especially ironic coming from someone that accuses the left of lacking interpretive generosity.
Pass.
journeytothenewworlds07's review against another edition
4.5
Some very interesting and spicy discussion topics- be open minded. Douglas Murray's commentary is fascinating and he is not afraid to go deep on the "hot button" issues
speranta's review against another edition
5.0
This book stands as a great reminder of the importance of being grateful for the cultural inheritance of the western culture, underlining the required collective effort to preserve what is good in it.
bradysbooks's review against another edition
4.5
Some parts of this boom ommit the other side of the arguments he is making. Others are shocking to hear about