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Mirror: goodreads
An easy read. Pleasurable infotainment where it confirms my preexisting positions, but unconvincing where it tries to change my mind. Educational in a shallow way: I acquired some new facts but no new arguments. Milo is often right, sometimes funny and sometimes trite. He is the most right about the most important thing: freedom of expression. He is also a character, though his exact degree of fictitiousness seems to be a closely kept secret. It's important not to take him more seriously than he takes himself, maybe even less so. While Milo is not an authority, this book contains solid recent political histories, a few good stories and some giggle-worthy jokes. He gets GamerGate right (ch10), having been so close to the centre of it. The story of his US college tour is also a good read. Unfortunately he doesn't always cite sources clearly enough to make it easy for readers to double-check his claims, which readers should do whenever skeptical.
I found the writing to be more witty than logical. It's great fun to watch Milo fearlessly eviscerate low-hanging extremist fruit in Feminism and Islam, but his higher philosophical aspirations are at times beyond his reach. For example, on page 203 he takes an anti-intellectual turn by claiming that a leftist ideologue's failure to understand a piece of fiction means we shouldn't think critically about fiction at all. He suggests that it's possible for a story to "simply be intended to entertain, shock, or amuse." But nothing (nothing good, anyway) can be that simple, as the conceptual tools used to elicit such reactions are always there, operating below the surface of a work. These meaningful tools, whether conscious or intuitive, are what good stories and performances are made of; likewise, their misuse is what makes bad work bad. They should be studied deeply. The real fight is to ensure that they are studied in an objective way rather than in a way driven by ideological bias. When one instead dismisses the whole matter of depth and seeks to "simply" elicit strong reactions from an audience, one becomes boring, cliche and irrelevant. If Milo truly doesn't understand this reality well enough to wield it, he may lose his grip on his influence and be forgotten much sooner than he would like.
Milo's deliberate cheeky offensiveness grows a bit stale when he is addressing an audience who, having sacrificed time and money to read his book in private, are very likely to already support him. I enjoy watching him troll others but am not easily trolled myself, so when he uses his provocative language in support of stupid things (like when he disparages abortion as "baby killing" and "child murder" while thoughtlessly conflating correlation with causation in the matter of post-abortion unhappiness in women, p88), I roll my eyes and get bored. Milo also appears to flit back and forth between supporting and attacking gay individualism throughout the book, as though it's okay for gays to freely direct their own lives as long as they don't freely choose domesticity -- also known as "heteronormativity," a far-left jargon term that would fit in well with some of his arguments against gays being anything but slutty shit-disturbers. Not that there's anything wrong with slutty shit-disturbing, of course.
I got bored enough to stop reading about two-thirds through the book, and came back a couple months later to get it out of the way before starting a new book. I expected the rest of the reading to be a chore, but I actually enjoyed the last few chapters, wherein Milo made fewer sociopolitical arguments and spent more time narrating his own activism. I'm much more interested in Milo's actions than in his beliefs, as the former are true adventures, while in cases of the latter I either already agree with him or already know why he's wrong.
One more small thing: on page 208, Milo spends a paragraph or two disparaging Richard Spencer as cringy, unconvincing, offensive, hateful and unfunny. Then he says, "I don't fear the ideas of people like Spencer, nor do I feel a need to hide them from view. [...] 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.'" But while throughout the book Milo revelled in accurately documenting the words and actions of his opponents to expose their weaknesses, he did not do this for Spencer. He did not quote, paraphrase, refute or address a single one of Spencer's "forbidden (and bad)" ideas. Why not?
An easy read. Pleasurable infotainment where it confirms my preexisting positions, but unconvincing where it tries to change my mind. Educational in a shallow way: I acquired some new facts but no new arguments. Milo is often right, sometimes funny and sometimes trite. He is the most right about the most important thing: freedom of expression. He is also a character, though his exact degree of fictitiousness seems to be a closely kept secret. It's important not to take him more seriously than he takes himself, maybe even less so. While Milo is not an authority, this book contains solid recent political histories, a few good stories and some giggle-worthy jokes. He gets GamerGate right (ch10), having been so close to the centre of it. The story of his US college tour is also a good read. Unfortunately he doesn't always cite sources clearly enough to make it easy for readers to double-check his claims, which readers should do whenever skeptical.
I found the writing to be more witty than logical. It's great fun to watch Milo fearlessly eviscerate low-hanging extremist fruit in Feminism and Islam, but his higher philosophical aspirations are at times beyond his reach. For example, on page 203 he takes an anti-intellectual turn by claiming that a leftist ideologue's failure to understand a piece of fiction means we shouldn't think critically about fiction at all. He suggests that it's possible for a story to "simply be intended to entertain, shock, or amuse." But nothing (nothing good, anyway) can be that simple, as the conceptual tools used to elicit such reactions are always there, operating below the surface of a work. These meaningful tools, whether conscious or intuitive, are what good stories and performances are made of; likewise, their misuse is what makes bad work bad. They should be studied deeply. The real fight is to ensure that they are studied in an objective way rather than in a way driven by ideological bias. When one instead dismisses the whole matter of depth and seeks to "simply" elicit strong reactions from an audience, one becomes boring, cliche and irrelevant. If Milo truly doesn't understand this reality well enough to wield it, he may lose his grip on his influence and be forgotten much sooner than he would like.
Milo's deliberate cheeky offensiveness grows a bit stale when he is addressing an audience who, having sacrificed time and money to read his book in private, are very likely to already support him. I enjoy watching him troll others but am not easily trolled myself, so when he uses his provocative language in support of stupid things (like when he disparages abortion as "baby killing" and "child murder" while thoughtlessly conflating correlation with causation in the matter of post-abortion unhappiness in women, p88), I roll my eyes and get bored. Milo also appears to flit back and forth between supporting and attacking gay individualism throughout the book, as though it's okay for gays to freely direct their own lives as long as they don't freely choose domesticity -- also known as "heteronormativity," a far-left jargon term that would fit in well with some of his arguments against gays being anything but slutty shit-disturbers. Not that there's anything wrong with slutty shit-disturbing, of course.
I got bored enough to stop reading about two-thirds through the book, and came back a couple months later to get it out of the way before starting a new book. I expected the rest of the reading to be a chore, but I actually enjoyed the last few chapters, wherein Milo made fewer sociopolitical arguments and spent more time narrating his own activism. I'm much more interested in Milo's actions than in his beliefs, as the former are true adventures, while in cases of the latter I either already agree with him or already know why he's wrong.
One more small thing: on page 208, Milo spends a paragraph or two disparaging Richard Spencer as cringy, unconvincing, offensive, hateful and unfunny. Then he says, "I don't fear the ideas of people like Spencer, nor do I feel a need to hide them from view. [...] 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.'" But while throughout the book Milo revelled in accurately documenting the words and actions of his opponents to expose their weaknesses, he did not do this for Spencer. He did not quote, paraphrase, refute or address a single one of Spencer's "forbidden (and bad)" ideas. Why not?
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