Book Reviewed: Free Speech: A History from Socrates to social media by Jacob Mchangama

Free Speech must ride on a free lunch Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world recently purchased the social media giant Twitter and said that his decision to buy Twitter was due to the progressive erosion of free speech. Free speech is a much-debated topic since it is closely monitored and regulated not only by social media but also by most democratically elected governments. In this book, the author says, that free speech is still an experiment, and no one can guarantee the outcome of providing a free, equal, and instant voice. It seems like free speech is an abstract and theoretical principle when confronted with tangible threats and harms. But despite its flaws, a world with less free speech will also be less tolerant and less democratic. A commitment to free speech should have a zero-tolerance policy toward organized threats, intimidation, and violence by groups seeking to establish parallel systems of authority. History has too many examples, Christians were once a small and persecuted sect during the first two hundred years after Christ, but when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, heretics and non-believers were severely persecuted. In the ninth century CE, Ibn al-Rawandi rejected Muhammad’s prophecy and Islamic doctrines without any serious retribution. If he were alive today, his life and liberty would be severely threatened, and in Muslim countries, he would have been in violation of blasphemy laws and punished by death. Free speech is the bedrock of democracy, and free exchange of ideas is essential in human endeavors and advancement. It promotes democracy, equality, and societal harmony. Most governments also have a legal system where free speech is distinguished from hate speech. The debate then would be where free speech becomes hate speech. But the laws in most democratic societies are fluid, because hateful or discriminatory speech becomes hate in specific contexts that directly causes imminent and serious harm to a group of a particular race, gender, their beliefs, or national origin. The "hate speech" at best is ineffective and counterproductive because this allows democratic governments, social media, and private organizations to monitor “hate speech” and regulate such behaviors. It turns out that free speech and human rights are different in the eyes of the law. In many West European countries and all Muslim countries, questioning about the Muhammad and Islamic teachings are considered hate speech, while one can questions any other religion and its teachings freely and that never becomes a hate speech. It appears that questioning about Islam incites violence from Muslims and jihad terrorism, hence, to avert such a violence, countries make hate speech laws. But there is no threat of violence from people of other faiths when their religions are discussed openly and honestly. The author discusses the free speech in the context of history and doesn’t discuss much about the digital world where social media have dominated people’s lives. The reading is a little heavy, you need patience with the author’s narratives.

Book Reviewed: Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies by Edward O. Wilson

The dawn of human nature The emergence of human social organization in the evolutionary biology appears to be a unique phenomenon. Societies existed among numerous species and humans, but the capability of communication with spoken language is unique to Homo Sapiens. The author observes that in each individual, altruism (the belief and practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others) was needed at a lower level of biological organization to re go one step ahead in generations. He refers to a group selection in which evolution acts on a whole group rather than on individuals, and in particular the concept of eusociality, which he calls that the highest level of organization of sociality that is characterized by cooperative brood care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. The division of labor creates specialized behavioral groups within an animal society which are referred to as 'castes'. Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform at least one behavior characteristic of individuals in another caste. The author provides examples like grandmother helpers, gay people, and monastics, he suggests that human society owes a debt of gratitude to “postmenopausal grandmothers” and “childless homosexuals” for societal organization or eusociality. His theory is purely speculative that suggest a single gene is responsible for altruism, and advanced social behavior is due to complexity of the human gene networks. The author provides little biological basis for his speculation.

Book reviewed: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter.

The racial dynamics of wokism Wokism is an alert to racial prejudice and discrimination, being a White person gives you privilege, and that makes Black people victims. The antiracism has evolved from a progressive ideology into a religion which tries to dismantle racist structures, but that made no progress because it is similar to the past racist arguments. Leftists went to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime, but have gotten worse in cities they control. The hidden narrative is that some people, by identity or experience are classified as victims and hence society must tolerate their destructive behaviors. But these experiments fail across metrics, wages, unemployment, income levels, test scores, incarceration rates, and health outcomes. Today’s anti-racist activists are not progressives because they fail to acknowledge the spirit of their culture and society which originates due to societal ignorance. Author John McWhorter says that the enlightened and self-appointed champions of anti-racism, whom he calls “the Elect” harm Black Americans. He identifies three waves of activism; the fight against slavery and legalized segregation, fighting racist attitudes by believing that it is a moral defect, and anti-racism is a religion! The Elect’s ideology of social justice is a grotesque form of moral exhibitionism. It is preoccupied with policing speech and regulating behavior. It is not progress or even compassion. For example, the largest American corporations have made massive spending commitments to support racial justice. Cable giant Comcast sponsors a program called Comcast RISE for minority-owned and women-owned businesses for free consulting, media, advertising, and technology assistance, along with up to $10,000 in grants. But businesses owned by white males are excluded. Amazon offers a program called the Black Business Accelerator, which offers cash, advertising credits, imaging services, and business coaching services. Similarly, Mastercard, and Microsoft operates programs for Black Americans that offers free services and grants for which White people are excluded, even though these programs are in direct violation of federal and state laws. Encouraging Black people to see themselves as perpetual victims, while assigning to White people the task of becoming enlightened enough to recognize their own racism creates a culture of bigotry. If Black students perform poorly on standardized tests, is it fair to assume that the test is racist, and must be modified so that Black students fair better? More Black students should be admitted to top schools using different standards to foster diversity, but it is racist to acknowledge that students are admitted for these reasons. For example, the acknowledgment of “White privilege” exhibited in some cases; when you see a YouTube Public Service Announcement, “I Take Responsibility” by pop singer Kesha; and Rosanna Arquette’s viral Twitter declaration, “I’m sorry I was born White and privileged,” looks like anti-racism in drag. How do we dismantle racists structures and embrace multiculturalism without culturally appropriating anything? For example, a tax break for capital gains is “racist,” since capital gains benefit Whites than Black people. But lowering interest rates may help all people to mortgage homes and get loans for businesses. But the same policy may push stock values which Whites may take advantage of than Black Americans. So, would it be racist to lower interest rates? Systemic racism is a valid term but dismantling racist structures or neutralize the Whiteness from White people is in the wrong direction. Because Black Americans don’t need their struggles validated by the sympathies of White people. The fact that progressive ideology in our time is the unwillingness to criticize bad ideas honestly for fear of being misconstrued as a bigot. The author makes a good case for dismantling the wokism and the associated racist structures, but being a Black man, he doesn’t distance himself from his “Blackness” in terms of offering better solutions to combat woke racism. There is such a thing as humanity and consciousness that by itself can judge its current society and understand the difference between being a Black person and a White. But they can not judge the actions of their ancestors who lived in 1922 America or 1822 America which was a different point in time, and they had a different social configuration. The universe is headed towards a non-equilibrium state, and this thermodynamic principle applies to life, economics, and human culture. So, creating an equitable society which is in equilibrium with all its characteristics may not be possible, but let humanity deal with this without the help from progressives, wokism or cancel culture.

Book Reviewed: The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man by Jeffrey Frank

The man of people This book narrates an intensely human side of a man who changed the world during the difficult days in the aftermath of WWII. There are numerous biographies of President Harry Truman in literature, but certainly this stands out well. I very much enjoyed reading the attributes of a man who accomplished so much when few people anticipated that he would accomplish anything significant. Harry Truman was born in Missouri, fought in WWI, married his long-time sweetheart, served as in the U.S. Senate, and became President of the United States. He made many historic decisions in the global history. For example, an urgent plea to Japan to surrender during WWII was rejected. Truman, after consultations with his advisers, ordered atomic bombs dropped on cities devoted to war work, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Japanese surrender quickly followed. In June 1945 Truman witnessed the signing of the charter of the United Nations. When Russians blockaded the western sectors of Berlin in 1948, Truman created a massive airlift to supply Berliners until the Russians backed down. Meanwhile, he negotiated a military alliance to protect Western nations, then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was established in 1949. After the onset of the Cold War, Truman oversaw Marshall Plan. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, he lobbied for intervention from the United Nations in the Korean War. He also deployed American forces without congressional authorization. He successfully guided the U.S. economy through the postwar economic challenges; the expected postwar depression never happened. In February 1948, the president submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress that proposed creating several federal offices devoted to issues such as voting rights and fair employment practices. This provoked a storm of criticism from southern Democrats in the runup to the national convention, but Truman refused to compromise, saying: "My forebears were Confederates ... but my very stomach turned over when I had learned that N*gro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten." Tales of the abuse, violence, and persecution suffered by many African-American veterans upon their return from the war infuriated Truman. But he also expressed criticism of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. In 1960, he stated that the sit-in movement to be part of a Soviet plot. President Truman was known for eccentricity. In the Oval Office he had the famous "The Buck Stops Here" sign on his desk. He was known to drink lot of Bourbon and play poker whenever time permitted him. When Washington Post music critic Paul Hume wrote a critical review of his daughter Margaret Truman’s musical concert, Harry Truman wrote a scathing letter in which he said, “When you write such poppy-cock as was in the back section of the paper you work for it shows conclusively that you're off the beam.” “Someday I hope to meet you. When that happens, you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes.” Corruption in the Truman administration became a central campaign issue in the 1952 presidential election.

Book Reviewed: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones

The 1619 project is a politically motivated story U.S. history documents the success of American revolutionaries in establishing a new nation for freedom and prosperity. The Founding Fathers were at enormous odds to fight a formidable enemy to end English authority in colonial America. But author Nikole Hannah-Jones, calls her work the 1619 Project named after the arrival of first Africans on American soil. And she seeks to place slavery at the center of American history. According to her, the reason for the declaration of independence from England was colonial America wanted to protect the institution of slavery when abolitionist sentiment grew in England. The story of American founding fathers in this book is different from what we find in the U.S Constitution or American history. It portrays slavery as a uniquely American phenomenon and the revolutionary war was fought to preserve slavery. Hannah-Jones proclaims that Black Americans’ struggle made American democracy real. She claims that the U.S. Constitution gave ironclad protections to slavery without mentioning it. How is that possible when the constitution explicitly states that “all men are created equal.” There are other factual errors, enslavement did not start in 1619 but it was present decades before that. Quakers comprised of only white population fiercely opposed slavery since colonial days and they were active in freeing slaves, documenting their stories, and connecting freed slaves with long lost relatives. American Revolution was kindled in New England, where anti-slavery sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the revolution helped to fuel abolitionism in the North. The publication of 1619 Project by the New York Times demonstrates that it does not care about the truth, as it has progressively moved to the Far-Left of the political spectrum. It hires and promotes journalists who belong to the woke culture, they misinterpret facts and glorify racism. This is an effort to falsify the history that focus on Black issues rather than the class conflict that occurred prior to 1776. The 13 states were deeply divided over the property right issues, economy, wealth and how a federal government may dominate individual states. The NY Times project is a conspiracy theory developed from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America that tries to discredit the American values. The book is malicious and inaccurate which offers a distorted economic history, misrepresents the intentions of Founding Fathers, and the legacy of President Abraham Lincoln. The 1619 Project curriculum is not an educational enterprise. It is a tool of political indoctrination. Since its publication, school students in all 50 states have been taught parts of its curriculum. The core of the social justice training uses the ideologies Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Marxism. To teach children that the American Revolution was fought to strengthen slavery would result in misunderstanding the American Revolution, and the loss of one million lives during American Civil War that ended slavery. The future American population will have the notion that their country is racist since day one. Currently, the 1619 Project applies a wide-ranging topics like the broken healthcare system, crime, American music, and the wealth gap.

Book Review: The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History Hardcover by The New York Times

An appraisal of NY Times book reviews We get a view of book reviews of the earliest years in the history of NY Times and its coverage in shaping the literature. The reviews encourage debate and exchange of ideas. An editor's note from 1897 points out, "Life is worth living because there are books.” The reviews became more opinionated, broader, and deeper since 1925. Some of the reprinted reviews in this book are edited for clarity and to shorten them. One can read errors, insensitivity, race and gender bias, and misunderstood masterpieces of their time. The inaugural issue of the book review started in 1896. In the early days, reviewers never used the term "I" that was discouraged by the newspaper, but the magisterial "we" was encouraged, like for example, what flaws did "we" discover in this promising book. Some examples of reviews are as follows: An unnamed critic wrote about Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” "Shall we frankly declare that after the most deliberate consideration of Mr. Darwin's arguments, we remain unconvinced.” In 1948, a reviewer dismissed Gore Vidal's novel “The City and the Pillar” as "pornography" not because of sexual content but because it was about the shame of two gay men in love. In the review of Christopher Isherwood’s’ “Novella Goodbye to Berlin” and the character of Sally Bowles, both of which inspired the musical and movie Cabaret. NYT reviewer gave a mixed praise for the author's gifts: "Isherwood is a real novelist, a real minor novelist." For Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 book “Interpreter of Maladies” Caleb Crain gave a lukewarm review for author’s plain language. “The Souls of Black Folk” a 1903 work by W. E. B. Du Bois, which is a seminal work in American history and a cornerstone of African-American literature used the term "double consciousness" applying it to the idea that Black people must always have two fields of vision. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how whites view them. The NYT review contains significant use of “N” word, in fact, eight times in the first paragraph alone, and there are eight paragraphs in the book review, which illustrates the height of bigotry even at New York Times. The unnamed reviewer largely focuses on the rivalry of W.E.B. Du Bois with Booker T. Washington who were two dominant leaders of African Americans, and NYT takes the side of Washington for his views that African Americans would be better off to remain separate from whites than to attempt desegregation as long as whites granted Black Americans access to economic progress and education. In 1981,Toni Morrison stated that "I have yet to read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand it. I don't care if the critic likes or dislikes it." The book is significantly edited and not all NYT book reviews are found. It is of historical interest to read as how African American authors were treated in literary world.

Book Reviewed: Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization by Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld

Illusions of book digitization This book focuses on the history of a universal digital library, and specifically focus on the entry of Google into the library arena with promise of making global books available online. Several leading academic institutions and public libraries eagerly joined this effort to accelerate the digital activity. They embraced the concept of a universal library and began advocating for change to disseminate the information, literacy, information access, policy awareness, digital preservation, collaboration, information access and control. On December 14, 2004, Google stunned the library, technology, and copyright worlds announcing that it would start scanning millions of books from leading research libraries to create a comprehensive database of books that would be available online. But this plan did not protect authors, which precluded them from earning a return on their investments of time, efforts, and knowledge which were essential to free flow of ideas. Google’s goal was to create an unrivaled digital library that would draw users to its website, strengthen its dominance of search-engine market, expand the client niche, and increase its advertising revenue. The libraries also wanted to digitize their collections but could not do themselves because of possible copyright violations and financial resources. Google had scanned about 20 million books, and it displayed snippets - short passages in Google online searches. It gave digital copies to libraries for their own use, in payment for their cooperation for loaning their books for digitization. The Authors Guild acted against Google Books, in the Second Circuit Court of New York, the court ruled in an unprecedented expansion of the “Fair Use” doctrine that Google’s copying and providing access to some four million copyrighted books for profit-making purposes was a “Fair Use.” The court was blinded by Google’s “public benefit” arguments, calling scanning a copyrighted book is a “Fair Use.” On April 18, 2016, the Supreme Court declined to review that decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the landmark copyright infringement lawsuit, Authors Guild v. Google. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case leaves in place the “Fair Use” doctrine and let Google have its way. Google with unlimited engineering and financial resources supported their aspirations and digitization went unhinged. But the digital transformation has led to tensions between global and domestic issues. Universal access and tech-controlled filter bubble, between freedom and control, between openness and truth, information and disinformation have made their way in an unprecedented way. Recently, Google threatened to demonetize publishers using its advertisement network if the publishers’ dissent from regime change idea for Russia. Similar threats were made by Google against publishers who accurately reported on BLM – ANTIFA riots across the country. In his book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has described the ways Google and Big Tech giants have been using heavy-handedness in pushing their own liberal and progressive ideas through their platforms. Shadow banning conservative ideas in Wikipedia and Google searches have become well-known in recent years. The authors of this book lack focus in narrating the history of book digitization, one chapter does not flow well into the next chapter. Chapters are open-ended with no conclusions. In chapter 7, the authors examine the role of Hathi Trust as an alternative to a universal library. It is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books. But the financial resources and the possible cooperation with other large libraries is unsure. And the fact that it still depends on Google Books for digitized content makes it less of an alternative for Google Books.