A World Without Truth is a Game Without Rules

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

While recovering from an injury years ago I had some time on my hands.  Between various books and chapters, I watched several episodes of the HBO television series “Game of Thrones”  (GoT). The show ran eight seasons from 2011 to 2019 and I found the series to be very well-produced with an impressive cast of actors and intriguing plotlines.

There are elements of fantasy in GoT as in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” paired with echoes of epic storytelling from medieval legends like Robin Hood or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But what appealed to me the most in the early seasons of GoT were the gritty politics and the realistic human consequences of actions, alliances, and betrayals.

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Deborah Birx’s Guide to Destroying A Country From Within

Guest Post by Michael Senger

Part of the fun of reading Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World is that you get to put yourself in the dictator’s shoes. In the book, Xi is an allegory for the Chinese Communist Party in the 21st century. Xi’s “lines” break up the writing with dark humor, a satirical jab at western elites’ blasé attitude toward an advanced, totalitarian regime with overtly-manipulative goals. The book invites you to see through the bad guy’s eyes and imagine just how easy it was to subvert the free world into totalitarianism using the response to a perfectly banal virus.

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