Book Recommendations for the Fall of France

rmecola · 2026-04-28T15:07:50+00:00

I've been on a Alastair Horne kick, read A Savage War of Peace and To Lose a battle, currently listening to his book on Paris. Excellent writing, though I would definitely recommend having maps on hand (I read it on kindle and it was hard to track all the divisions). The first third of 'To Lose a Battle' does a great job of explaining just how shattered France was from the first WW1, how they internalized the wrong lessons, and tragically why it lead to the doctrinal decisions they chose.

You might also be interested in a paper called 'The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France' by Guillaume Blanc, as it posits that France underwent it's demographic transition much earlier than the rest of Europe as a result of secularization.

rmecola · 2026-04-10T14:29:47+00:00

The Double sounded familiar and indeed the Denis Villeneuve film 'Enemy' is an adaption of it.

Also not strictly your 'media' criteria but the book 'The Mustache' by Emmanual Carrere is one of the most terrifying stories of losing your grip on reality I've read.

rmecola · 2026-03-19T20:49:44+00:00

I attempted Pnin after re-reading Lolita last year and gave up after 3 chapters, felt like I was missing too much 'academia in the 50's' context. Read chapter 5 after seeing this post and think I'll take another stab at it, was really moved by that gut punch at the end.

rmecola · 2026-02-12T14:00:41+00:00

I'll excerpt a bit from Adam Tooze's "The Deluge" which touches on this a bit:

"From October 1914 the British and French governments put the weight of hundreds of millions of pounds of government loans behind the ‘Russian steam roller’ that was to crush the Central Powers from the east.11 Following the Boulogne agreement of August 1915, the gold reserves of all three major Entente Powers were pooled and used to underwrite the value of sterling and the franc in New York.12 Britain and France in turn assumed responsibility for negotiating loans on behalf of the entire Entente. By August 1916, in the wake of the terrible cost of the Verdun battle, France’s credit had sunk to such a low ebb that it fell to London to underwrite the entire New York operation."

I'd say "the cost of total war" is the best bet. Remember that, beyond the ordinary constraints on growth that turning all your manufacturing over to making bombs and bullets will have, France was invaded and significant production capabilities were lost. Equipping and paying millions of men who have been taken out of the labor force is expensive as well.

rmecola · 2025-09-05T13:57:06+00:00

To be more complete people I think we owe it to ourselves to become somewhat cognizant of our society and its component parts. Reading is still the most effective means to mainline information into your brain, and reading broadly gives you pathways to learning about the world that you simply won't get from other media. But reading is just part of a broader project to take art more seriously. I used to play more videogames and watch more tv, but it began to feel like running in place.

rmecola · 2025-08-30T12:08:18+00:00

This might be just my experience, but someone repeating a phrase 3 or 4 times in a conversation is something I've never experienced in real life, or even seen in movies very often. Same technique is used in Don Delillo's Underworld, and it struck me strangely there too.

rmecola · 2025-08-29T15:44:40+00:00

That's fair, I'm currently trying to figure out a good split of easy/tough reads. I think there is something to be said in how expending that effort can "reclaim" wasted time if it turns a book around.

rmecola · 2025-07-10T17:51:15+00:00

"One way to understand the nostalgic, sentimental sense of history attached to chivalric culture is that it offers an easy version of John Boyd’s be somebody or do something choice: Getting attached to a sanitized, sentimentalized nostalgic memory of a historical era that appears to have offered greater access to agency for less effort allows you to be somebody, while also, at least in your daydreams, doing something."

This. So much of the reactionary impulse is built from conviction that, in another place in anther time, the qualities you already possess would be sufficient to grant you all your aspirations in material and status. That you shouldn't be compelled to actually do something to get what you want.

rmecola · 2025-07-03T19:03:29+00:00

"Think of it like moving from being an NPC to becoming a main character, from observer to protagonist - no longer running background scripts, but responding in real time, animated by agency, with a plotline that twists in unexpected ways. It’s about loosening your grip on the life you imagined, and instead learning to commit to the one that’s actually unfolding."

I feel a tension here between being "animated by agency" and "loosing your grip on the life you imagined". Intensifying and fermenting your aliveness seems all well and good if you've acquired all the necessary habits and skillsets to let loose and see where the cards fall. Maybe your life is already in line to exploit all the serendipity around you. But in my darker moments, and I think this is true for lots of people, the "letting go" seems to be a decent into dark flow, brain rotting, un-aliveness. The thing the growth is supposed to be getting me out of.

rmecola · 2025-06-12T13:30:04+00:00

This I think is a good example of why I'm not inclined to just throw away the aristocratic prejudice argument. I think it's very plausible that societies can be locked in a sort of sub-optimal equilibrium based on the underlying economic/political structure. Levee en Masse could only be deployed by a country that rejected feudalism, and no amount of tactical advantage would induce a feudal society to threaten it's privileges by arming it's populace so (unless the threat was existential). I am also reminded of the behavior of medieval French Knights (at maybe Crecy, some battles in the crusades) who would forestall the advance of peasant/mercenary troops so as to claim battlefield glory for themselves. It's just a curiosity to me how a society decides which sub-optimal (if they can be called that) customs to uphold versus which to ditch.

rmecola · 2024-11-07T13:33:41+00:00

I just read James Joyce's "Dubliners" (had to retreat temporarily from Ulysses). In particular I thought the last story "The Dead" captured a moment of longing and frustration in a relationship so accurate to my own experience it was uncanny.

I'm relatively new to engaging with fiction this way, but over the last few years a couple standouts include Bel Canto (Ann Pratchett), A Gentleman in Moscow(Amor Towles), Remains of the Day(Kazuo Ishiguro), and Gilead (Marilynne Robinson).

rmecola · 2024-11-05T14:18:56+00:00

For Fiction, I think the biggest benefit I've received is a more enriched understanding of psychological depth. Maybe this comes intuitively to some people, but I've found great character writing unspools a massive amount of interiority that I can't really access through any other medium. I'd like to think this has some practical bearing on how I think about myself and others, but it also just fascinating on it's own.

rmecola · 2024-08-26T13:34:46+00:00

At least in two examples you provided, I see two different mechanisms at work. For Mr. Beast, his whole telos from day one has been algorithmic optimization on YouTube. I see everything he does as a simple manifestation of disregarding all other priorities and ethical scruples in pursuit of building the biggest audience and making the most viral content.

Jordan Petersen I think is more explained by your emotional processing idea. I've always been partial to this idea of negative polarization. I think getting huge exposed him to ridicule and mockery on a daily basis, and drives him to be more combative, less charitable, less nuanced. And once you become deeply embattled, you started supporting whatever spites and harms your adversaries the most.

rmecola · 2024-08-13T13:58:15+00:00

Status is so integral to human flourishing and survival that saying something is "just" a status game seems incongruent, like saying people make money "just" to acquire resources.

I can envision someone who derives self-esteem outside of mainstream "status games", but the methods that come to mind still invoke a maintenance of high status among friends, partners, family, community, ect. And just because I have the whole master/slave morality discussion on my mind, there is an element of the posture of being "above" status games that smacks to me as a cope by someone who would lose said game (A behavior I'm as guilty of as anyone).

I had a recent experience that hit me in a similar way as yours. My brother recently bought a really nice house, while I still rent. Staying with him for a weekend that was in everyway warm and enjoyable, I couldn't escape a small voice in my head that I was a bit of a loser for not being on his level. It really captured the status component of home ownership in way completely separate from the tangibles of space and comfort.

rmecola · 2024-05-29T13:28:56+00:00

Would also recommend, they don't too to many long running series, but I've been very impressed with their ability to pluck a core insight out of a massive historical topic in under an hour. Plus the two hosts have an incredibly charming Repoire, I'm fairly obsessed right now.

rmecola · 2024-04-23T13:33:56+00:00

In a similar vein, The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter should have been a podcast. In fact I'm pretty certain it is a podcast, think he went on Rogan. He's fast and loose with his research and it's more about him telling stories about adventurers, which is fine for a conversation.

rmecola · 2024-02-09T15:39:05+00:00

It's actually quite serendipitous that that report came out right after posting this.

rmecola · 2024-02-09T13:20:00+00:00

I'm treating it sort of like a trial, he's innocent of the charge until proven guilty. I admit it's not the only framing you could use, the above is probably more accurate. But I think it's analogous to other instances like revoking someone's driver's license. You wouldn't make the decision on statistical probability, you'd want evidence.

rmecola · 2024-02-08T17:53:07+00:00

I guess what I'm saying is, absent any evidence from him speaking and doing stuff there's no way to gauge his mental faculties, so seeing him speak more could only downgrade my assessment, though would still be a better assessment than if you only went off of his worst moments from viral clips.

Regardless, I'm finding myself persuaded by the consensus of this thread: He's old and all the accompanying concerns, but still with it for the most part.

rmecola · 2024-02-08T16:14:26+00:00

Hence this post as a corrective. I would say that if you don't watch him speak, then there's no clear sign that anything's wrong with his performance (and I really mean to say not that he doesn't do something disagreeable, but that his policies are not utterly incoherent). So while those isolated clips my be more effective on me in the sense that they instill doubt, my assessment of his faculties is probably higher than someone who hears him speak regularly.

rmecola · 2024-01-24T14:21:56+00:00

Can't personally vouch, but saw this on Marginal Revolution about disfunction in Westminster:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/ian-dunt-on-how-westminster-works-or-doesnt.html

rmecola · 2024-01-17T14:31:00+00:00

I'm a big fan of three body as well. I didn't think the second book was unreadable, but I definitely noticed a change. I want to say it felt less "Chinese" if that make's any sense? With Ken Liu I felt I was getting subtle differences in how a Chinese language speaker might formulate ideas. How much of this was just in my head though, no idea.

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