To remedy this, I’ve recently started reading the PDF of the Economic History of Peru (a text I was learning Spanish in order to read) using a combination of the WordReference dictionary and, more often and more usefully, the Google Translate website to translate unknown words and short phrases. This is intended to make it more likely for me to memorize words by making it less easy to look up unknown words and sentence structures than using the Google Translate browser extension (an extension which does not work on PDFs). This is not copy and pasting whole sentences into the Google Translate website as I originally did for the Adventures of Pinocchio, which greatly reduced my progress, but is only hand typing single words and short phrases!

The translations by Foster and George indicate words that are missing but which have been reconstructed by enclosing them in square brackets, and words that are only implied in the Akkadian by setting them in parentheses. George also indicates words that are problematic or somehow obscure by setting them in italics. I do none of this. Words that are ambiguous, implicit, emended, or reconstructed appear in regular typeface, giving my best guess at what the text once said (mostly following George’s edition). The reader who would like to know exactly what is in the original manuscripts and what modern philologists have emended should consult George’s edition or go to the eBL website.

Helle, Sophus. Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (p. 1). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

You only need to read Tablets XI (the flood) and XII (description of the underworld). The rest is not very good, but may be entertaining for some readers. Tablet XI contains a story about a plant that restores youth that Gilgamesh takes from the underworld, but is then stolen by a snake. This story is at least somewhat reminiscent of the first few chapters of Genesis. For some reason or other, Tablet XI is extremely well preserved, which makes it much easier to understand.

Chapter XII shows how similar, yet very different the Babylonian concept of the underworld was to the current Christian one. Helle in the afterword says the abandonment of Sargon II’s capital of Dur-Sharrukin may have been due to Assyrians’ belief that Tablet XII is a reliable guide to what goes on in the underworld.

The epic is just what the title says; it’s an epic about the “two-thirds god and only one-third human” Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. As the Epic is likely intended to be fiction, I think it says little about what Babylonians actually believed about their mythology (for that I recommend the Enuma Elish and Julian Jaynes’ vital Origin of Consciousness). Both Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu are portrayed as superhumans, who are still vastly less powerful than the often imperfectly moral gods. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill both a monster guarding the Cedar Forest in Lebanon and the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar, which results in Enkidu being cursed by the gods Anu and Enlil to quickly die. What is most annoying about the epic is that (according to Andrew George), due to the ease of damage to clay, only about two thirds of it are preserved, making numerous storylines impossible to know.

For understanding Babylonian mythology, much more useful than the Epic of Gilgamesh is the Enuma Elish (as I said, available for free online here), which comes rather close to the monolatry of the Old Testament. From one of I think Peter Turchin’s blogposts I recall that axiality [the thought patterns of the Axial Age] first began in Egypt around the fourteenth century BC, with increasing emphasis on the dominance of the god Amun. There is also a parallel here to Ancient Greece and the belief in the dominance of Zeus (see Hesiod’s Works and Days).

According to Helle’s afterword, there was a large change in Babylonian scribal practices c. 1200 BC, about the time Jaynes says the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia began to break down. I attribute this to the postural transition from “SocLib” and "SocDem” to “White” (“White” including Chinese scribes, most militaries, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses [available in print, though not really in Kindle, here]), probably due to some kind of agricultural revolution. The transition resulted in the scribes adding many more repeats to the text, which I found more annoying than useful.

Rating: three stars out of five (two stars for the first ten Tablets).

The book simply is not very well organized, but, once you read all of it, the thesis becomes clear. The point is that Paul was explicitly a Jewish apostle to the Gentiles in a desire to make them more sympathetic with Jewish anti-Roman political aims by converting them to worshipping the Jewish God.

Paul didn’t concoct his hoax for the Jews; it was strictly for the ‘benefit’ of the gullible Gentiles.

Skrbina, David. The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years (p. 80). Creative Fire Press. Kindle Edition.

The heart of the argument, p. 64-70, describes how Paul was explicitly against worship of the Roman gods and that he claimed “all Israel will be saved” through the spread of his new religion (at least on the basis of the Gospels, based around worship of a Jew crucified by the Romans, though Paul himself never mentions the part about the Romans) to the Gentiles. Following that are select passages from the Gospels that suggest militancy; e.g., “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” and “whoever has no sword is to sell his cloak and buy one”, while making the obvious point that the Gospels say the Son of God was killed by Roman authorities, with the implication that the Gospels were intended to agitate against Roman rule of Palestine. This is a plausible enough earthly motive of the people who came up with early Christianity, but is only half (the supply side) of the coin of early Christianity’s spread.

Skrbina’s opposition to miracles (which, contrary to the current focus of science, do exist in a pretty blatant fashion) does not come across as successfully defended or even particularly coherent, though if miracles were widely done across the first century AD Roman Empire, this does not make a strong argument for Jesus’s divinity (and, indeed, Skrbina on p. 31 mentions Paul and Peter were, according to Acts, also capable of raising the dead).

The most glaring problem with Skrbina’s book is that it doesn’t discuss the other (demand) side of the coin of early Christianity’s spread: why did Christianity grow so popular with the Roman military during the third and fourth centuries? Of the known third century Christian churches, three (Legio-Megiddo, Dura-Europos, Aqaba) are associated with the Roman military, two of which (Legio and Dura-Europos) were started c. 230, around the time of the “certainly very favorable to the Christians” Emperor Severus Alexander, himself Lebanese born and guided by his Syrian born mother. In a glaring omission (but which doesn’t contradict his point), Skrbina makes no mention of Paul’s visit to Damascus and spending time in Arabia, thus making it substantially likely (by my guess a ~60% probability) he was an apostle to Arabs as well as to Greeks. Indeed, the Arab Emperor Philip was, like Severus Alexander and unlike the Balkan born Maximinus Thrax and Decius, tolerant of Christianity.

At least Skrbina realizes the irony of Jews both inventing Christianity and, in the long run, coming to hate the Roman Empire when it institutionalized it.

It seems that Mark’s anger against his fellow Jews, however, got the better of him; for centuries afterward, Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place.  Perhaps there’s a kind of justice in that irony after all.

Skrbina, David. The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years (pp. 68-69). Creative Fire Press. Kindle Edition.

Indeed, as A.H.M. Jones wrote,

The Jews and Samaritans were the only minority who reacted to persecution with active hostility. They rose in rebellion several times, and when under Phocas and Heraclius the Persians invaded Syria and Palestine they seized the opportunity to burn the churches, loot the houses of the Christians and force them to deny their faith or massacre them. They alone openly rejoiced at the calamities of the empire and welcomed its fall. We have contemporary evidence that the Jews of Palestine exulted when the Roman commander Sergius was overwhelmed and killed by the Arab invaders at the end of Heraclius’ reign.

and, again

But evidence is entirely lacking that either sect [Donatists or Monophysites] envisaged secession from the empire, or gave welcome or support to the empire’s enemies. If the Donatists had supported the Vandals, we should certainly have heard of it from Victor Vitensis and the other African catholics who told of the tribulations of the faithful under the Vandal kings. We know from Coptic sources that the Persian invaders of Egypt under Heraclius were remembered not as liberators but as scourges of God, and John of Niciu took a similar view of the Arabs. The only religious minority which showed active hostility to the Roman government was the Jews, and they seem to have been goaded into opposition only by Justinian’s ruthless measures. The Jews of Naples were the backbone of the city’s resistance to Belisarius, and the Jews of the East took advantage of the Persian invasion under Phocas to turn upon their Christian oppressors and rejoiced in the defeat of Heraclius’ armies by the Arabs.

One of the more notable points of Skrbina’s book is his description of unfavorable views of the Jews by a lengthy list of classical Graeco-Roman authorities. As Skrbina says,

To say that the Jews were disliked is an understatement.  The critiques come from all around the Mediterranean region, and from a wide variety of cultural perspectives.  And they are uniformly negative.  I note here that it’s not a case of ‘cherry-picking’ the worst comments and ignoring the good ones.  The remarks are all negative; there simply are no positive opinions on the Jews or early Christians.

Skrbina, David. The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul's Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years (pp. 55-56). Creative Fire Press. Kindle Edition.

Skrbina does mention Celsus’s (free translation here) opposition to Christianity and Judaism, but I wish he was more thorough in examining his critiques. Sadly, no mention is made of Porphyry’s more advanced critique of Christianity.

Overall, the thesis isn’t an inherently implausible one, but the book’s coverage is incomplete.

Rating: three out of five stars

Utah had among the lowest COVID death rates in the US in 2020; New Jersey had the highest

Utah has the highest mental illness rate of any state, New Jersey the lowest

Utah swung least of any state for Trump last year, New Jersey swung the second most of any state

Utah has the highest marriage rate in the US, New Jersey among the lowest

New Jersey is overwhelmingly White ethnic, Utah among the least

New Jersey is among the most Catholic states, Utah is the most Mormon

New Jersey is on the sea coast, Utah in the deep interior

The alphabet is extremely straightforward and logical. If one knows what one’s doing, it can easily be learned in a week -probably faster than the Korean alphabet, due to the Persian language’s lack of strange sounds. There are numerous repeat sounds (e.g., s and z) for historical reasons, but this adds only a bit more time to learning the alphabet.

Despite the alphabet’s relative simplicity, Iran’s literacy rate as of the nineteenth century was very low -5% to be generous, probably not much above that of Tajikistan. The best reason for this is that the right to left (shoulder dominant) writing direction of the Persian alphabet, though remarkably good for speedwriting, resulted in lower back damage and reduced fertility among the scribal class over time (the “hunchback” ED-209 robot in Robocop famously stands for “Erectile Dysfunction - Fresno”). Thus, Iran’s literacy rate in 1950 was just 13% (in comparison that of historically Buddhist Thailand, which has a similar average IQ, was 54%, and Burma had the highest literacy rate in British India). The reason I bothered learning the Persian alphabet is because (prior to c. 1850), Iran has been more influential than Japan (which had a “special path” in creating a relatively simple writing system with a chin up writing direction -katakana). I didn’t bother learning the Urdu alphabet (an expanded version of the Persian) because, according to a poster on the Language Simp Discord server,

No one uses the alphabet now

At least casually

They write urdu in the English script

Here's an example: How are you is written as "kaise ho?"

If you can speak urdu well then you can write it in the English script and you don't need to worry about spellings and stuff because it isn't the official script

The first thing one has to remember when learning the Persian alphabet is that the Persian alphabet primarily relies on dots to distinguish letters. 18 of the 32 characters have dots in them. The reason the be letter has one dot under it, while the pe letter has three dots is because the ye letter, when in the beginning or middle of a word, has two dots under it. The reason the te letter has two dots above it, while the se letter has three, is because the nun letter has one dot above it.

The best way to learn the isolated letters is to simply listen through children’s songs such as this one:

The second thing one has to remember is that the letters are generally modified by their position in a word. The best way to learn the non-isolated letters is simply to go through this video while looking up the letters in this list in WikiBooks:

Of course, it also helps to write out the alphabet on paper while indicating the sounds in the Latin alphabet next to the Persian letters. If one has very bad handwriting in the left to right writing direction, one should be expected to have much better handwriting in the right to left writing direction.

Here is a good video on Persian handwriting recommended to me in the Farsi Discord server.

There are only three vowel marks outside the generally used alphabet, which are described from this screenshot of Dr. Know:

The first I’ve read is, on the recommendation of Bryan Caplan, “From prophecy to charity” by Lawrence Mead. The title refers to the author’s opposition to using the style of Old Testament prophecy to denounce the insufficiency of funding to counter the problem of American poverty, and instead supporting private and state charity with conditions attached. The point of the book is that modern American poverty is, unlike American poverty c. 1960, not a problem of a lack of opportunity, but of a lack of good incentives to work full time, as only 3% of full time workers in America are poor, and government programs based on improving job skills or giving aid with no conditions attached instead of incentivizing employment failed miserably. It’s not essential reading by any means, but it is useful if you want to get a good understanding of the Caplanian view of American poverty. It is, after all, in Caplan’s top ten favorite books on the subject of both global and American poverty.

The second pamphlet I’ve read is a 39 page ebook titled “Selected Passages from the Chinese Philosophers” by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh. The only philosophers in that pamphlet whose quotations are of any worth are Mencius, and, to a lesser extent, Xunzi and, still to a lesser extent, Zhuangzi. Again, it’s useful if you want to get a brief impression of the classical Chinese philosophers’ thoughts, but is obviously inferior to actually reading the classics themselves (see bottom of the Google doc here) if one has the time or attention span.

I have to say it is the worst religious work I have ever read. The text consists of a difficult and highly repetitive mix of Rousseau, Orwell’s 1984, and portions of the Gospels. Contrary to many claims, it is not obviously libertarian or even anarchistic, but it is highly supportive of both personal and governmental austerity. As Legge says, “The Tâoist proclivities of the founder of the Khin dynasty are well known.”. That dynasty was as far from libertarian as one could think.

Here are some selected quotes from the text.

The above quote is similar to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, in which, interestingly enough, he condemns the China of his day for being too obsessed with the sciences and arts - “there is no vice that does not dominate them, no crimes with which they are not familiar… what purpose did all its learned men serve? What benefit has resulted from the honors bestowed on them?”.

There is some similarity here with the synoptic gospels. It is notable that though Christianity in Europe was only one religion, in China, aspects of it were split into three and were never fully fused -Daoism resembling Jesus’s sayings, Buddhism resembling Christian doctrine, and Confucianism resembling Christian institutions (though I may be in error here, as I do not know much about either Buddhism or Confucianism).

As Orwell wrote in 1984,

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

There is a clear similarity here to the aversion to enlightenment of the common people found in 1984. It is quite remarkable that a religion so openly averse to evangelism spread at all, and especially that it became popular enough that copies of it were found in ancient tombs.

This is clear support of a government’s neglect of the populace -but, as the below quotation suggests, it is probably a malign neglect, rather than a benign one imagined by some libertarians.

Overall, the text was an annoying and dreary read.

Instead of reading the Dao De Jing, I suggest just reading the Gospels/Rousseau’s First and Second Discourses/Orwell’s 1984. Given the popularity of the text in ancient and medieval China, it must have appealed to a certain type of postural bicameral, most likely the one (as in Orwell’s 1984) that could touch his toes.

I only thought the starting chapter and the conclusion were good (though they could have been much better), along with, to a minor extent, the chapter on a small business owner thrust into disability and having to take care of some 20 family members in his home. The first chapter describes how and why America’s cash welfare system was replaced with a system that “subjects able-bodied adult recipients to work requirements” (p. 7). The conclusion describes some ideas the authors have for fixing America’s government assistance programs to the poor.

The meat of the book is several detailed anecdotes of people who have experienced $2.00 a day poverty, mostly women and mostly bouncing from low paid job to NEETdom. The people the authors survey in detail do, with hardly any exceptions, exactly what you would do if you were stuck in their situation. All of them, though often victimized by others (for instance, by thieves who steal copper plumbing before the person interviewed in detail moves into or works in a home), are portrayed as purely rational actors (with the exception of the small business owner mentioned above taking out a home equity loan to purchase a pizza shop). The problem with these anecdotes is that the plural of anecdote is not data. Though the book has some aggregate statistics on the $2.00 a day poor, there is not nearly enough of them.

An important point made in the book is that different states design their welfare programs differently and the parts of the country poor people tend to move away from often have little in the way of opportunity for cash income for the very poor from government, charitable, or business sources.

Despite the academic origin of the book’s authors, the authors’ policy recommendations in the conclusion remain surprisingly conservative. Though the authors reject returning to the old AFDC, there is strikingly little description in any part of the book of what was wrong with it, other than that it was discordant with (unfortunately only sparsely described) “American values”.

Though the conclusion largely focuses on job creation as the most important strategy to “lift up the $2-a-day poor” and the book earlier pointed out the Great Recession ruined the Sandusky pizza store of the small business owner mentioned above, there is strikingly little discussion of monetary policy or any other form of business cycle stabilization, as opposed to more generic stimulus for job creation for people willing and able to work and at risk of $2.00 a day poverty -after all, if the primary problem for the $2.00 a day poor is lack of employment, it certainly makes sense to advocate a monetary policy that promotes stable job growth, particularly avoiding a deficiency in aggregate demand such as that which occurred during the Great Recession and its aftermath.

The single most annoying part of this book was a complete lack of international comparisons. Poverty exists in every country, but it was at least worth looking at ways to deal with it from rich and even upper middle income countries. The authors do nothing of the kind.

Perhaps the most important (though rarely noted) point of the book is that culture is downstream from policy -while AFDC resulted in rationalization among its recipient welfare mothers against getting a job, America’s current tax credit and spending policies result in rationalization among poor mothers in favor of getting a job - “In the years prior to welfare reform, in-depth conversations with hundreds of single mothers on welfare illuminated their belief that taking a full-time job would greatly detract from their ability to be a good parent, especially if they had young children… Now [the typical single mom] was telling researchers that to be a good parent, she had to model the value of education by getting a job.” (p. 32).

The largest deficiency in the meat of the book was failing to examine the nature and origins of unusual preferences overrepresented among the very poor. Though I am not much of a Caplanian on poverty, the chapter on a household and their surroundings in the Mississippi Delta dramatically underdescribes the commonality of their town’s residents’ lack of personal virtue, only pointing this out by the report the one police officer hired “to patrol the streets part-time” in the small town “was quite certain that most of the town’s residents would be imprisoned by week’s end (p. 143)”.

I’ll read the Caplan recommended From Prophecy to Charity next.

Rating: two out of five stars

The main storyline is of a Dinka boy named Salva who loses his parents as a result of the Sudanese Civil War and walks from his school near Loun-Ariik in Tonj County, southern Sudan all the way to a refugee camp on the Ethiopian border in 1985 along with more than thirty other refugees. The refugee camp is closed with a wave of mass murder by the new Ethiopian government in 1991 and Salva ends up in a Kenyan refugee camp, where he learns the English alphabet. Ultimately, in 1996, due to good luck, he is sponsored by a church to live with a White family in Rochester, New York, where he gets an email that leads him, after nearly nineteen years, finding his parents back in southern Sudan. He and friends of his White family then start a program to build wells in southern Sudan. The main character is real and the story is mostly based on true details- “This book is based on the true story of my life.”.

The book is remarkably violent while having weak storytelling skills (it tells more than it shows), but an interesting, if straightforward plot (in my opinion, the fictional subplot with the Nuer girl walking to water every day of the year was unnecessary, or could have been merged and split off into a separate section).

I thought it remarkable that there was a stable refugee camp at all in Derg-controlled Ethiopia (which, of course, became a bloodbath once Ethiopian rebel forces took over and decided to force the Sudanese refugees back into Sudan).

Some elements of the plot are, to say the least, implausible -supposedly the main character led some 1500 lost boys from the Sudanese-Ethiopian border in 1991 to the Sudanese-Kenyan border over the course of a year and a half, some 1200 of them surviving, and that, earlier, the main character’s group of “more than thirty people” managed to cross the White Nile via multiple canoes.

The book makes it clear that the importance of the Internet is generally understated in modern Western media - it is difficult to believe Salva’s story would happen even in modern South Sudan, which at least has some cell phone and Internet service. Indeed, it is by an email from a cousin of his in Zimbabwe that the main character learns that his father is still alive, being treated for guinea worms at a southern Sudanese UN medical facility.

If there is one lesson of this book, it is to be nicer to refugees. After all, not everyone has had the opportunity to live like comfortable Westerners.

Rating: three out of five stars

I created this map because there is far too much talk about the European dark ages without specifying which parts of Europe had dark ages. I had a longer post on this here. Cyan is the Northwestern Roman Empire region (I got the term from Scheidel’s Escape from Rome), yellow is the Northeastern Roman Empire region, dark green is the Southern Roman Empire region (united by the Arabic language and Islam), magenta is greater Iran, dark blue is European barbaricum (very sparsely populated prior to the dark ages), light green is East Asia and dark cyan is South Asia. The black polygon is roughly “the most compact polygon (in terms of land area) that encloses 80 percent of the places where the significant figures [in Europe from 1400 to 1950 AD] grew up” from Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment.

Both the northeastern and northwestern Roman Empire regions had dark ages (the first starting in the fifth, the second in the seventh century); the southwestern Roman Empire region (not shown separately) also had a dark age in the sixth to seventh centuries, but had a very strong recovery under Islamic rule. The southeastern Roman Empire region had no dark ages, at least, prior to the second plague pandemic.

Interestingly enough, China had a dark age during the fourth to fifth centuries, while India also had one with the fall of the Gupta Empire. I am not sufficiently well informed about Iran to know if it had a dark age at any point between 400 and 1000 AD.

And remember…

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The old map used to be here.

Comment if you see any errors.

As far as I can tell from the writings, Ho Chi Minh supported Communism for two reasons: the gross abuses of French colonial rule (and the capitalist inequality that went with it) and that socialism (strictly Stalinist; Ho Chi Minh condemned Trotskyists as “agents of fascism”) could provide an equitable path to economic development for peasant countries. As of 1960 Ho judged the future economic and developmental prospects for North Vietnam to be pretty good.

However, the gross abuses of Western imperialism were common in so many poor countries, yet, of former imperial territories only half a dozen or so countries in Africa plus South Yemen had Communist revolutions, this including military coups. Another dozen or so non-European countries had transitions to more moderate socialist governments, presumably to maintain more of those countries’ traditional class structure.

Absent a military coup, as, say, in Ethiopia and Benin, the Communist takeover of Vietnam, much like Yugoslavia’s fall to the Communists, could not be imagined without World War II. Ho Chi Minh rose to power in all Vietnam in 1945 due to the Communists’ leading role against the Japanese occupation. Even the Communist victory in China was unlikely to have happened without World War II and the Soviet Union’s gift of Manchukuo to Mao. Thus, the ascent of Communism in the world’s first, second, and third most populous (as of 1980) Communist countries was due to historical accidents. Were it not for a historical fluke, Vietnam might never have had a serious Communist movement stronger than that of, say, France (recall how many people fled North Vietnam in 1954-5).

Ultimately, Ho Chi Minh’s writings read more like those of a nationalist rather than someone committed to socialism above all. The first part of the works are clear as to his support for pragmatism in tactics. It is difficult to underestimate how much the continued poverty of socialist countries relative to neighboring capitalist countries contributed to the collapse of socialist economic models around the world. Ultimately, due to the rise of Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Dengist China, the Vietnamese government (unlike the vastly more ideological Cuban one) wisely abandoned Communism in much of the economic sphere, and is today one of the most hopeful countries in Asia in regards to future economic growth.

The Communists in Vietnam in 1945, 1954, and 1975 ultimately won because starving peasants (unlike rich peasants and the middle class) naturally tend to Communism. After c. 1970, for instance, the Thai Communist movement was doomed due to rapid Thai economic growth.

Rather unusually, the book actually gets better the more one reads it, only coherently describing the double slit experiment on page 158. The discussion of quantum gravity and the potential for quantum entanglement to be used for wormholes is also interesting, but, contrary to the book’s “Instant Expert” label is too superficial for any but the most ignorant readers. The book seems more like a series of magazine articles rather than a book.

Rating: two out of five stars

Dems =mixed class, Southern, leftwing, libertarian, anti-Black, pro White ethnic

Second Party System (typical election: 1844):

Dems =low class, non-regional, leftwing, libertarian, anti-Black, pro White ethnic

Third Party System (typical election: 1880):

Dems =mixed class, Southern, right wing, libertarian, anti-Black, pro White ethnic

Fourth Party System (typical election: 1908):

Dems = low class, Southern, leftwing, anti-libertarian, anti-Black, anti-White ethnic

Fifth Party System (typical election: 1944):

Dems = low class, Southern, leftwing, anti-libertarian, pro-Black, pro White ethnic

Sixth Party System (typical election: 1988):

Dems = low class, non-regional, leftwing, anti-libertarian, pro-Black, mixed on White ethnics

Seventh Party System (typical election: 2024):

Dems = high class, non-Southern, leftwing, anti-libertarian, pro-Black, anti-White ethnic

After drinking just a few sips of Sprite Zero Sugar I was unable to read easily for about two days or think clearly in regards to economic matters for about three to four days. I suspect it’s outright toxic (but, again, I don’t know which ingredient causes this).

Edit: I am 85% sure that when I wrote Sprite Zero Sugar I meant 7 Up Zero Sugar. Coca-Cola Corporation tends to have good chemists, so they are unlikely to make a mistake like this.

Diet Pepsi, on the other hand, immediately resulted in me feeling a strong feeling of blood flowing faster through my veins and an overall pleasant mental sensation. I experienced a little of this with Sprite Zero Sugar, but nowhere near as much as with Diet Pepsi. I also experienced slightly less mental concentration than usual, but not nearly as much as with Sprite Zero Sugar. I also had a strong desire to frequently listen to this song:

Diet Coke hasn’t had any major mental or physical impacts on me; I mostly noticed its sweet taste and its slight hint of sodium. The fact it’s so widely used (according to Richard Hanania) among prominent people in the tech sector suggests to me it’s mostly nontoxic.

Given the fact I don’t know which diet soft drink ingredient causes what, I suggest just sticking to coffee (according to Michael Greger, four or so cups per day is optimal), especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

What most struck me about the book was how similar today’s North Korean regime was to the Yi Dynasty (with the exception that the Yi Dynasty had less liberation of women -which Seth points out was a major difference between the Yi and Goryeo eras). As Seth writes,

There was little social mobility and commoners were kept in their place, not only by being excluded from positions in government, but by requirements that their clothes, homes, and carts should be different from those of the aristocracy.

Neo-Confucian literati were concerned that everyone should know their rank so that order could be maintained—so much so that they developed the hop’ae system in which people wore identity tags indicating their status.

This is an even greater resemblance of political regimes than (as mentioned by Bryan Caplan) that of the Soviet Union and Imperial Russia. The strong emphasis on learning Confucian doctrine in the country under the Yi Dynasty is certainly reminiscent of the emphasis in modern day North Korea on remembering the doctrines of Kimjongilism-Kimilsungism. This is probably the greatest criticism of the ideas of Boldmug in regards to the virtues of absolute monarchy -technology is an endogenous factor.

As Korea today, premodern Korea was notable for being extreme in the extent of its foreign borrowings. As Seth says (referring to the 16th century),

in general Korean intellectual life was dominated by a dogmatic rigidness not found in contemporary China or Japan.

To some extent this rigidness must have been a result of genetic changes -had the Confucian scholars below replacement fertility rates, we would have seen as the (likely posture-induced) gradual decline of the scribal class in the Muslim world. As Seth writes,

As the state became more Confucian, the upper class became more linked to it.

Unlike today’s South Korea (but like today’s North),

Compared to China or Japan, the country was less urbanized, the merchant class smaller and less wealthy, and the volume of trade was more modest.

Above all (though Seth does not emphasize this), Yi Dynasty Korea remained starkly reminiscent of today’s North due to its seclusion from the outside world.

If there is anything more I would have liked for this book to have had, it would have been a greater description of the society and culture of today’s South Korea -it is, after all, in a state where it no longer experiences dramatic economic or political changes.

Rating: five out of five stars

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KOCR-qSvx0vi0XU18pglwh84NVkk2i0DANdHeM4xMmo/edit?tab=t.0

Please add suggestions to add or remove books as you wish in the comments.

The book is not as well composed as the Shortest History of Germany (which is at least good as a troll history), but has a better composition than the Shortest History of Italy.

I will still recommend Ienaga’s Pacific War when it comes to 1900-1945 Japanese history. I have not read enough books about pre-Meiji Japan to make book recommendations about this subject.

Rating: three out of five stars

There is an error on nearly every other page. Unfortunately, the book, contrary to my expectations, did not get better as it went on, but somehow got worse (despite the recent past being well within the author’s memory). The third wave of democratization (1973-2000) is almost entirely denied. The work of “Russian computer hackers” in the 2016 US election is attributed to “skillful disinformation” rather than leaking newsworthy DNC emails and Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs transcripts. The period from c. 1920 on is so bad (with a useful digression on communication and transportation technologies and the rise of Hindutva) that I would have written it entirely differently. The comments on neoliberalism in the last portion of the book are so bad as to be laughable. It is clear the author completed the book in order -for instance, the author correctly refers to “regional variants of vernacular Chinese” and the fact “the classical language… differed as much from vernacular Chinese as classical Latin differed from vernacular Italian” when speaking of Matteo Ricci, but writes a completely misleading explanation of the Chinese writing system when describing the rise of Zhou China; the fall of the Indonesian dictatorship is mentioned, but only after saying “political liberalism withered away in the post-Cold War world”.

Rather interestingly, the discussion of the origins of modern economic growth (which is even more Eurocentric than even I would write) is almost Smithian; the scientific revolution is mentioned, but only briefly, and the most important invention mentioned (the chronometer) is remarked on as thus; “Far from enabling early European maritime success, precision celestial navigation arose out of it.”

This is not the worst history book I’ve read (that would be Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind), but it’s likely in the top ten, certainly in the top twenty. I cannot recommend it.

Rating: three out of five stars

Overall, I found that after copying the Adventures sentence by sentence into Google Translate for twelve chapters, I still could barely understand even a few words, which was a surprise to me given my success with this method while learning Mandarin by watching subtitled Mandarin videos. I think my mistake in learning Italian was attempting to get the meaning of the text by translating sentence by sentence rather than word by word or, if necessary, phrase by phrase. By translating sentence by sentence, I was relying too much on the automatic translation and could not easily associate words between languages. I think this method worked so well with Mandarin is that I typed out each sentence from a combination of both listening to subtitled videos and remembering characters, rather than simply copying and pasting characters from a source.

I thus changed my learning habits for Italian by installing the Google Translate browser extension. This extension easily allows one to translate a text word by word and, if necessary, phrase by phrase. I also, when necessary, now copy and paste unknown Italian words into the WordReference dictionary, much as I do unknown character combinations for the Yellowbridge Dictionary when learning Mandarin. As with Mandarin, I make sure to look up each unknown word, so as to make the words better stick in my mind.

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