Rising Up and Rising Down

What Hacker News says

1. rsyncSep 2020
   This is an interesting list. I strongly recommend _The Good Earth_ which is one of the best books I have ever read.

   In the non-fiction category, I would nominate _Rising Up and Rising Down_[1] by William T. Vollmann. There is a single, abridged volume. It's a grand, sweeping, beautiful and fascinating work.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Up_and_Rising_Down

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2. rsyncAug 2015
   Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

   Author: William T. Vollmann

   It's a 7 volume set, but has a one volume abridged version which is one of the more fascinating and thought-provoking books I have ever read. I rate it very closely to GEB.

   Highly recommended.

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3. nooronJul 2014
   William Vollmann's Rising Up & Rising Down is worth your time. If you're inclined towards philosophy of science or epistemology, I'd also recommend R Nozick's Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World.
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4. rsyncDec 2012
   The MIT "platform series" is fascinating - specifically:

   _Racing The Beam_ (study of the atari 2600 platform) _The Future was Here_ (study of the amiga platform)

   Best books I've read in the last five years:

   _Debt: The First 5000 Years_

   _Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means_ (william vollman)

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5. a_m_kellyNov 2010
   If you find yourself to be interested in this sort of thing more broadly, in the justification of violence or it's utility, I recommend William T. Vollmann's exhaustive, intricate attempt to establish a framework for understanding the motivations, morals, and ethics of violence in his work Rising Up and Rising Down: Some thoughts on Violence, Freedom & Urgent Means.

   To give some idea of what the text is like, here's a little bit of it from a section called "Where Do My Rights End?":

      Justified Choices of the Self:
      1. Whether or not to violently defend itself against violence; 
      2. Whether or not to violently defend someone else from violence.
      3. Whether or not to destroy itself.
      4. Whether or not to help a weaker self destroy itself, to  save it from a worse fate.
   
      Conditions: 
      1. No attachment to nonviolent creeds. 
      2. No attachment to collectivity or authority which might prohibit the self from removing itself from "the line of fire"
      Caveat to (1) and (2): So-called involunrtary attachments are not binding..." (pg 81-82. Abbr. Edition)
   
      ...

   The abridged edition from which I quote above is over 700 pages and includes case studies and narratives of people, nations or groups acting a certain way, which Vollmann slotting them into his "Moral Calculus," I haven't had a chance to finish it yet but I remain interested in the elaborate thought experiment that is the book and the vividness of the historical anecdotes it contains.

   Vollmann would fully support responding to violence in kind, there's a long section on non-violent movements and their utter hopelessness in the face of regimes unwilling (like bullies) to tolerate any dissent.

   [The classic example of this is perhaps Harry Turteldove's story "The Last Article," which proposes Ghandi campaigning in a Nazi occupied India and ends just as you would expect it to.]

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6. JasonADruryFeb 2026
   > Do you think the cartels are in the right here?

   Of course not, none of the sides are at all in the right here. But from the cartels perspective, they're almost certainly in the right.

   Drug cartels are entirely the result of poor policies, and the blame for all the harms caused by them rests primarily on the shoulders of those perpetuating those policies. Surely the politicians that vote for laws that directly enable drug cartels to exist in the first place must be worse than the leaders of any individual drug cartel?

   Any kind of serious analysis of who's more right would end up being a work at the scale of Rising Up and Rising Down, that's probably best avoided.

   If we oversimplify cartels into innocent businessmen just looking to sell drugs, with governments being the ones that introduced violence into the equation in their effort to stop them? Surely it must be the cartels

   If we oversimplify cartels into evil criminals just looking to wield power over other human beings, with governments just trying to liberate people from cartel tyranny? Surely it must be the governments

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