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This was a good read, though it didn't seem like the author quite knew what point he wanted to be communicating: he started off by saying 'we shouldn't be afraid of men', then talking about the reasons for why Zimbabwe is in the state that it is, then finishing it off by saying 'that's why we shouldn't be afraid of men'. He didn't really try and relate the two in any way, as valid as they are individually they didn't seem at all relevant to one another in this case. There may be some sort of special context that I'm missing out on (something that your native Zimbabwean may be more familiar with) that makes it all a bit more clear, but that should really be introduced first if that's the case.

Still, the whole idea behind extractive and inclusive institutions and their connections with poverty is a really fascinating topic, the YouTube channel Steve Jacobs Comedy explains it all in a very entertaining manner, and you can of course buy the book if you want to know the full story.

If I had a decked out hazmat suit, I feel like it could actually be pretty interesting. Unfortunately they're $1700 on Amazon.

The book the writer was working on at the time, the strikingly but misleadingly titled Redneck Manifesto, is truly great. It's like a print version of the most biting, knowledgeable, and funny commentary at TiA—but written two decades ago. It was "ahead of its time," as people say when they don't know how long the world's already been the same kind of fucked up it is now.

Reviewers I'd expected to embrace it all had the same wrongheaded complaints about it. The first was that it's a "Marxist" book. Nobody (to this day) seemed to recognize it as a unique entry in a long tradition that's recently come to be called libertarian class analysis, a framework that the non-establishment right (and some of what refuses to call itself the "right" because "right" means redneck cooties) is just now finally coming (back) around to. It's the original, irrecuperable, not bullshit version of "privilege" talk, the one longed for by everyone who thinks there's something to it but it's gone too far now. That's not quite what happened.

Reviewers' other complaint was that too much of a book that said Redneck on the cover was about the proto-"hipster" scene the author lived in, the conspicuous alterna-consumers and self-obsessed public diarists ("'zine" makers) of the post-punk world. '90s tumblrinas! He accurately pegged their cultish pen-pal network as a hazardously overspilling poison vat of hypocritical upper-class white assholery, cultivated pseudo-illness and pseudo-guilt, etc.—everything that makes us here today wonder "Where the fuck did all this shit come from?!"

He saw it first. He even predicted the "trucker hat" fad and the return of lumberjack beards. How the fuck?!

A lot of Goad's other work is crazy and/or trollin', but Redneck is a monster truth bomb about the one thing he truly understands. Non-referrer Amazon link because Thought Catalog is fuccbois. Best $1 (plus shipping) you can spend right now.

If you guys haven't read her book, I highly recommend it. There's a lot of little insights that you can't quite cram into a page-length Reddit post.

If you are interested in learning more about this, there is a famous economist you may have heard of called Thomas Sowell, who has written extensively on this topic.

His most extensive work on the topic, from my perspective, is the book below:
http://www.amazon.com/Race-And-Culture-World-View/dp/0465067972

edit: spelling

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