A review by rick2
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
3.0
The core concept is fantastic. I think the mechanism of destruction to profiteering is well illustrated.
This book starts to sound a little bit like Mongolian throat singing after a while, where at first it’s really novel and you’re like whoa that’s interesting. But then, after about two songs, you start to go “you know it’s kind of the same thing and realistically I’m not catching the nuance in any sort of significant way“ Klein seems to find that every business action is malicious and done with a sort of cackle and evil intent. Is she wrong? I don’t know. That’s not a really straightforward answer. But it does get a little repetitive.
Is the say that while the core concept is powerful, blaming everything on capitalism has been kind of a developing pet peeve of mine as of late. It strikes me as unrealistic and short of supplying your own sort of framework for how it should be, it’s starting to become sort of an empty punchline that Business is the root of all evil.
I’m coming to this opinion from a pretty neauvou liberal background. But earnestly I can’t quite bring myself to believe it anymore. I think there’s a lot of harms imposed by our current systems and economic structures. But also many of the good things and positives like easy availability of food and medicine stem from the same system. Unfortunately, I read this book kind of in the middle of that transition so a lot of the stuff struck me as very discordant. It’s like hearing the chance that your favorite football team have against another bad football team for the first time and you’re like “well yeah like we’re telling these other fans that they should drive their car into a telephone pole. That’s not the coolest thing.“
This book starts to sound a little bit like Mongolian throat singing after a while, where at first it’s really novel and you’re like whoa that’s interesting. But then, after about two songs, you start to go “you know it’s kind of the same thing and realistically I’m not catching the nuance in any sort of significant way“ Klein seems to find that every business action is malicious and done with a sort of cackle and evil intent. Is she wrong? I don’t know. That’s not a really straightforward answer. But it does get a little repetitive.
Is the say that while the core concept is powerful, blaming everything on capitalism has been kind of a developing pet peeve of mine as of late. It strikes me as unrealistic and short of supplying your own sort of framework for how it should be, it’s starting to become sort of an empty punchline that Business is the root of all evil.
I’m coming to this opinion from a pretty neauvou liberal background. But earnestly I can’t quite bring myself to believe it anymore. I think there’s a lot of harms imposed by our current systems and economic structures. But also many of the good things and positives like easy availability of food and medicine stem from the same system. Unfortunately, I read this book kind of in the middle of that transition so a lot of the stuff struck me as very discordant. It’s like hearing the chance that your favorite football team have against another bad football team for the first time and you’re like “well yeah like we’re telling these other fans that they should drive their car into a telephone pole. That’s not the coolest thing.“