I read Bill Browder's Red Notice. It's an interesting book in that the self-reflection is well hidden; Browder is the grandson of Earl Browder and he decided to take vengeance on his lineage by becoming the douchebaggiest capitalist he could, including stints with Robert Maxwell, BCG and Solomon Brothers. While at BCG he discovered that you could absolutely pillage the former USSR thanks to the shitty way douchebaggy capitalism decided to piss on communism's grave. Then Browder runs up against the rise of the oligarchs who aren't particularly interested in sharing the wealth with the West, complications ensue, Browder hires Sergei Magnitsky to sue Putin basically and the dude becomes a humanitarian on his way to talking congress into treating the oligarchs like pirates instead of diplomats. Dude still thinks he should have been allowed to ass-rape the former USSR, though. I started that book about three days before Traumazone dropped. Which is not a book but is 100% worth your time because rather than Adam Curtis going out and shooting a bunch of stuff and pontificating, it's just Adam Curtis grabbing content out of the BBC's b-roll library and sparingly subtitling it. Browder's book had an advertisement at the end for Thieves of State, which I was absolutely there for. Sarah Chayes decided reporting for NPR in Afghanistan wasn't rewarding enough so she tried to run a women's NGO there for a few years. It's pretty gnarly. She makes the point, quite insightfully and exhaustively, that it isn't so much the form of government that determines whether you live in an oppressive shithole it's whether it's corrupt or not. Which is why every Indian I've ever talked to thinks the world of Modi - he's anti-corruption. MBS? anti-corruption. Lukashenko? Ran on a platform of anti-corruption. Hugo Chavez? Anti-corruption. You can be a dictator for a long-ass time. A corrupt dictator? You're just opening the job up to anyone more ruthless than you. And then I read all of the Uplift Universe. Which should have been better. Which is pretty much David Brin in a nutshell. Then because I'm such a fun-loving guy I read the WSJ's take on MBS which is a lot less forgiving and introspective than Hubbard's book. I'm reading some other damn thing about dictators but since I read with my ears and since I now have an hour or two of industrial music to prep every week I've let it slide. I evaluated 130 albums last week. I kept 40. I'm also reading J Malcolm Wild's "Clock Wheel and Pinion Cutting" because I bought no less than 66 watchmaker's wheel hobs off eBay and I don't know the first fucking thing about wheel hobbing. But boy howdy once that mill is running I'll be in one hell of a spot to hob the shit out of stuff. S. Riefler's "Compensating Pendulums and How To Make Them" (1905) is mostly "just add mercury." Not the most practical advice 120 years into the future.
I was recently talking with an Indian friend of mine who pointed out that the Modi government has all but outlawed cash transactions of any sort. The other friend I was with, who is a right winger to the extreme, said, yeah that’s because they want to control you. To which the Indian friend said that no, it’s because it’s the first time in history that even poor people can prove that they made a transaction and it’s not just their word vs someone richer and more connected. He doesn’t have any illusions about Modi, but puts that forward as an unambiguous good for the country.
I had an Indian acquaintance who told me that nothing happens in Delhi without sweets boxes full of cash. That, he said, was why Indians buy so many sweets - you can't accomplish anything official without a gift of sweets (with cash in them). He was pretty incensed about it, too - clearly, his entire life was one big grifty adventure of paying bribes to dipshits. We talked about Modi changing out all the currency and he saw it as an unalloyed good. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the petty grifters to come clean about some of the taxes they hadn't been paying and a leveling of the playing field for all the mid-level dipshits who had been grifting their entire adult lives. Notably, my friend is not a muslim.