The Dubious Monk

I read a book by a couple of Sean’s profs today. The book was published by a little Winnipeg press so I can’t give you an Amazon link. It’s called Social Murder and has a big ol’ bowl of tomato soup on the cover, which I assume is supposed to be blood, though it may just be soup. It’s a lot brighter than any of the bowls full of blood I’ve ever seen (I can think of three off-hand from China and that doesn’t count sinks full of blood which used to be a regular winter occurrence in my house).

The book though was very interesting. It’s talking about how the capitalist system is a horrible thing, especially when conservative economic thought tries to make sure the state doesn’t get involved. For most of the book it stayed in a much larger scale than I’m used to thinking. It seems when I read about politics I read about specifics of this election or that issue and what these parties have to say. Until this book’s chapter on democracy it stayed somewhat above blaming problems on specific presidents or whatever but was talking about a system in which it doesn’t really matter who’s in charge.

The most interesting chapter was about health stuff. Their point was basically that cancer is the price of capitalist society. It took the discussion out of the realm of genetics and specific behaviours and into the way our society is structured and how that makes us sick (like how overcrowded cities made for horrible nasty infectious diseases in centuries past).

Now I kind of knew some of this stuff before but I’m no expert in any of this, so it’s hard to call bullshit on things. Except for the caricaturization of journalism schools as teaching students to get “both sides of the story.” Jskools actually do get a tad more into things than that. The whole media bias section (seven paragraphs) was a little basic and since it’s something I actually came in with knowledge about I felt a little underwhelmed by the authors’ insight. If I knew more about the rest of the book’s content would I feel they were glossing over a lot of stuff? I don’t know. But for a lay reader it seemed fine.