"Them" by Jon Ronson

Sssshhhhh!!!

we have dome this before btw, but i'm too lazy to search for the old thread...

I still think "Them" is one of the best non fiction books I've ever read, it raises so many points of discussion. and has some of the funniest anecdotes!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0481636/

yesterday

His Alpha course documentary was broadcast tonight.

overheard it: seemed to involve the increasingly embarrassing richard dawkins.

dawkins is ruining atheism for me. Almost 14 years and I almost want to jump ship.

I skipped through it but didn't see any Dawkins. Jon Ronson says there were a couple of Dawkins-esque people in the group but he mostly left them out of the programme. It was quite interesting but the Alpha Course isn't really weird enough to be that interesting. Apart from the speaking in tongues of course.

the alpha course is kind of creepy just because i've seen it advertised places and it in no way mentions the fact that it's a religious recruiting tool. Loads of vague generalities. I don't know if I really care enough about it to watch a programme though.

some good characters and story ended rather abruptly

That's the joy of C4OD - you can just watch a few minutes here and there. The best bit was the OAP freegon (is that how you spell it?) sorting through bins in what looked like the less salubrious parts of Oxford. The worst bit was any bit with the dead eyed Alpha Course "table readers" rather sneering attitude towards their...erm...customers. Guaranteed to head you straight back to atheism I would have thought.

xp

Ok, it's "freegan".

he looked a bit like dawkins. was good to see what goes on in these courses but yeah too lacking in weirdness, and ronson's mild mannered delivery didn't make it any more watchable.

Loved 'Them', really liked 'Goats'.

How weird to come to an ILX thread with no hate.

this fucking ronson cunt really gets my goat. kill him.

now we're on ilx.

liked it when he showed the psychology student his new shoes

me too. i thought it seemed overall worse than usual for ronson, just due to the whole thing not working out as particularly great telly, rather than due to faults on his part. none of the things you might have wanted to see happening happened.

Trailer for "Men Who Stare At Goats" is out: http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/themenwhostareatgoats/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/mar/27/jon-ronson-spambot-video?CMP=twt_gu

I can't remember the last time i heard him sound so annoyed. That said, i can't really remember the last time i head him interview anyone so annoying. If you had some grand overarching reason for wanting to draw attention to the work of automated algorithms, and you were talking to a journalist, why wait 45 minutes to reluctantly tell him what it is?

Just bought a copy of "Them" cheap at a sale bookstore, never heard of this guy before, this looks like a cracker of a read.

I went through a patch of reading him over the summer, starting with the Psychopath Test and goin g through Them, thought there was another one too. Think I read Men Who Stare at Goats last year.
I used to read him in the Guardian or Observer whenever that was, 20 years ago? Is it that long? Connecting it with being prior to my coming to Ireland though.

Saw a book of his collected journalism around the time I read the 2 this year but didn't pick it up. Was also toying with buying Goats but pretty sure I'd already read it. & he's got another one out recently that has asimilar cover to Psycopath Test, it was a featured book in the local chain newsagent.

I was also intrigued by th eother book on Psycopaths that came out recently, th eone with the story about the woman who meets a man at her mother's funeral and gets on with him very well, then for saome unexplained reason kills her sister. I think its an assessment question, 'can you give a motivation for why she would do such a thing?'. & depending on what your answer is you may or may not be designated to have sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies. Book intrigues me.As did meeting Robert Hare through a college society about 10 years ago. Psycsoc put on a talk by him at the local university while i went there.

Them is a brilliant book. Watch the accompanying TV show, Secret Rulers Of The World, too. Goats is good too, really interesting premise and a good argument.

long article on competitive eating by Ronson from last GQ.

I actually read all of that without realising it was by Ronson.

http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/a-chat-with-jon-ronson

"Them" was awesome btw, finished the whole thing in a couplea days. Very entertaining. I like his Theroux-esque style.

But I couldn't do it. I spent three months and I just couldn't do it. And the reason was because I kept on meeting people who worked in the credit industry and they were really boring. I couldn't make them light up the page. And, as I said in The Psychopath Test, if you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring.

Scary and interesting observation, that.

Haven't read the new one but the premise makes it sound like the worst devil's advocate bullshit.

And I know it's wrong to judge someone based on how they look but

http://www.maximumfun.org/images/jonronson_jt.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CCgFLkmWAAAT6z_.jpg

^ from a galley, cut from the final publication, but stiiiiiiiill...

I asked Mercedes to explain to me one of the great mysteries of modern shamings - why they were so breathtakingly misogynistic. Nobody had used the language of sexual violence against Jonah, but when Justine and Adria stepped out of line the rape threats were instant. And the 4chan people were about the most unpleasant.

‘Yeah, it’s a bit extreme,’ Mercedes replied. ‘4chan takes the worst thing it can imagine that person going through, and shouts for that to happen. I don’t think it was a threat that anyone intended to carry through. And I think a lot of its use really did mean “destroy” rather than sexually assault.’ She paused. ‘But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don’t talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn’t occur to most people as a male degradation. With men they talk about getting them fired. In our society men are supposed to be employed. If they’re fired they lose masculinity points. With Donglegate she pointlessly robbed that man of his employment. She degraded his masculinity. And so the community responded by degrading her femininity.’

know it's wrong to judge someone based on how they look but

remember his page-topper photo from Select in the '90s?

ha ronson said anything publicly about bill cosby's shaming in social media?

No but he did seemingly try to humanise Katy Hopkins in the Guardian Weekend magazine a couple of weeks back.
Thought that might be why the thread revive.

I used to like his articles, was it in there or the Observer?
Now I've read most of the books except the recent Public Shaming one. Unless I'm not aware of a couple.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI

Ted talk about Twitter shaming.

https://twitter.com/jwherrman/status/677913441240276993