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Javier E

A stereotype-busting map of the countries where children are most likely to get drunk - 0 views

  • The massive study on the well-being of children in 29 developed, Western countries looked at, among many other things, the frequency with which children ages 11, 13 and 15 reported they “had been drunk at least twice” in their short lifetimes.
  • American kids, who otherwise appeared to under-perform their European peers in the study, are the least likely to have gotten drunk
  • Maybe that lends a bit of credence to the U.S.’s relatively late and well-enforced drinking age, unusual in the Western world
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  • They’re joined by the tee-totaling kids of Iceland, the Netherlands and, believe it or not, Italy.
  • Kids appear to be much more likely to get drunk in former Soviet states, particularly the Baltic states, and in Finland
Javier E

The Quiet Efforts to Battle Silicon Valley's Bro Culture - WSJ - 0 views

  • It has been a little over a year since the #MeToo movement made it safer for women to speak out about the toxic aspects of workplaces in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Since then, many tech companies and venture-capital firms have begun developing internal policies and diversity initiatives that they hope will shake up a culture that was previously defined by the idea that the single white man with no obligations outside of work is the best kind of employee.
  • But it is becoming increasingly clear that the most profound cultural disruptions are happening in a subtle and less public way, influenced by the women in tech who are fed up with the status quo and want change to happen more quickly.
  • “Changing culture is all about these kinds of micro moments,” says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab who has conducted research on troubling workplace behavior in the tech industry. “It is the micro moments that will become the macro and change the norms of professionalism.”
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  • “Bro culture is a dynamic that’s been creating men-only environments in their most toxic form by encouraging bad behaviors, from excessive drinking to heavy sexualized talk, that excludes women and any person who doesn’t support those behaviors,” Ms. Cooper says.
  • She adds that it isn’t just women whom bro culture excludes. It’s anyone who doesn’t want to participate in these kinds of behaviors. “Very few people enjoy those things, but they don’t want to stand up to the popular crowd making the rules,” she says. “I like beer pong as much as the next person, but I don’t want to do it at work. “
  • Perhaps the biggest efforts involve separating work from alcohol. Stories abound in Silicon Valley about networking events that happen late into the night at alcohol- and drug-fueled parties
  • “We make sure the activities we do within the company and with the founders are gender-neutral,” Ms. Hebb says. “We aren’t doing whiskey drinking and shooting. We’ll do a scavenger hunt, or a hike, which is actually a better way to get to know people than over drinks. Is a scavenger hunt less bro-ey than drinks? It’s different, and we think that relates to a broader group of people who have felt excluded from a singular way of networking
  • In 2017, Pipeline Angels announced an alcohol-free policy. It came about when Pipeline Angels’ founder, Natalia Oberti Noguera, attended a tech conference where the host announced an impromptu “drunk talk” on stage. It’s a fairly common tactic in Silicon Valley, with the idea being that a volunteer from the audience will drink a lot and then give a talk in the hopes that alcohol will make that person more vulnerable and more forthcoming.
  • “Do you know who volunteered to give the drunk talk? A white guy,” Ms. Oberti Noguera says. She didn’t see that as surprising given the potential reputational risks of getting drunk for someone other than a white man.
  • “We’re already vulnerable,” she says. “It’s not safe in terms of our reputation for a woman, a man of color or a nonbinary person to get drunk and give a drunk talk at a professional event. And so I thought I can take someone else’s mistake and make it a best practice. Now all our events, including meals and evening receptions, are alcohol-free.”
  • “Something like 90% of VC investors are men,” Ms. Nelson says. “Only 2% of VC dollars go to women. That’s the definition of bro culture—men supporting men, opening doors for one another and making those connections.”
  • “We’re opening doors for people that weren’t open before,” she says. “You can really have whatever kind of culture you want. It’s up to us to determine what that is.”
Javier E

James Q. Wilson Dies at 80 - Originated 'Broken Windows' Policing Strategy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down.
  • The approach is psychologically based. It proceeds from the presumption, supported by research, that residents’ perceptions of the safety of their neighborhood is based not on whether there is a high rate of crime, but on whether the neighborhood appears to be well tended — that is, whether its residents hold it in mutual regard, uphold the locally accepted obligations of civility, and outwardly disdain the flouting of those obligations.
  • acts of criminality are fostered by such an “untended” environment, and that the solution is thus to tend it by being intolerant of the smallest illegalities. The wish “to ‘decriminalize’ disreputable behavior that ‘harms no one’ — and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order — is, we think, a mistake,” Mr. Wilson and Mr. Kelling wrote. “Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community.”
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  • when a window is broken and someone fixes it, that is a sign that disorder will not be tolerated. But “one unrepaired broken window,” they wrote, “is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”
  • “The importance of what Wilson and Kelling wrote was the emphasis not only on crime committed against people but the emphasis on crimes committed against the community, neighborhoods,”
  • “I know my political ideas affect what I write,” he acknowledged in a 1998 interview in The Times, “but I’ve tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I’ve written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn’t know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.”
Javier E

It's the Guns - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • here is a simpler and more powerful explanation of why there has been no similar school shooting in Germany since 2009; or in Canada since 2007; none in the United Kingdom since 1996—while conversely, more young Americans have died in school shootings in 2018 than in all the nation’s combat operations all over the world.
  • The answer is almost insultingly simple and has the virtue only of being true: It’s the guns.
  • Back in 2012, Nate Silver observed: "Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South, or a number of other demographic characteristics.”
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  • More than 70 percent of Trump voters in 2016 described guns as “very important” to their vote, versus only 40 percent who described abortion as “very important” to their vote and only 25 percent who felt that way about gay rights
  • With the slow fading of battles over same-sex marriage and abortion, and the rapid collapse of other aspects of conservative ideology, guns may now rank as the single most important political dividing line in 21st century America.
  • Only 30 percent of Americans own guns. Thus far, that minority has sufficed to block substantial federal action on guns. But a one-third minority—and especially a non-urban one-third minority—may no longer suffice to shape American culture.
  • The outrage after Parkland looked less like a political movement, more like the great waves of moral reform that have at intervals since the 1840s challenged the existing political order in the name of higher ethical ideals.
  • The most important success of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for example, was not to change laws (although they changed some), but to change hearts: to persuade Americans that drunk driving was not funny, not charming, and not acceptable.
  • American gun culture in the 2010s is as blithely irresponsible as American alcohol culture in the 1960s.
  • According to a Pew survey, only about one-quarter of gun owners think it essential to alert visitors with children that guns may be present in the home.
  • Only 66 percent of gun owners think it essential to keep guns locked up when not in use. (Ninety percent of non-gun-owners think so.) Only 45 percent of them actually do it.
Javier E

Why One Cardiologist Has Drunk His Last Diet Soda - The Experts - WSJ - 1 views

  • The study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal searched the literature for randomly controlled studies involving non-nutritive sweeteners. They found a mere seven trials, with a total of only 1,003 people, that evaluated consumption of the substances for more than six months.
  • The bottom line was that they generally failed to find that sweeteners helped people lose weight. Since most people use sweeteners for the purpose of controlling or losing weight, if they were considered drugs instead of a food substance they would be deemed ineffective based on the best evidence available.
  • They found that people who consumed these sweeteners were more likely to have increases in weight and waistline, and a higher incidence of obesity, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular events.
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  • Many discount these nonexperimental studies—I know I have done so for years. But now I am taking another look as studies are starting to indicate that diet sweeteners could be hurting, instead of helping weight-loss efforts.
  • Colleagues at my institution argued in 2015 that such sweeteners are far from inert. They showed an impact on hormone secretion, cognitive processes and gut microbiota—and concluded that all of these effects could counter weight control intentions.
  • What was clear is that these substances again were linked to weight gain and metabolic disturbances.
  • It is reasonable to ask why these substances were not evaluated as drugs in the first place. Millions of people are exposed to them every day, and yet their long-term effect is uncertain. Could they be actually causing the health problems they were intended to prevent?
  • the burden of proof is on the manufacturers to show benefit and demonstrate safety through clinical trials.
Javier E

'Damn, that fool can write': how Martin Amis made everyone up their game | Martin Amis ... - 0 views

  • He will for ever be remembered as part of the “Class of 83”, the inaugural Granta Best of Young British novelists list that also included Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro.
  • “He has had a baleful influence on a whole generation,” bemoaned AS Byatt of Amis in 1993, as one of the Granta judges tasked with finding successors a decade later. Not because he was a bad writer but because so many had been foolish enough to try to emulate him
  • At an event in 2020 with Salman Rushdie, Rushdie asked him if, back in those heady days, he felt part of a gang. “That’s the way ‘movements’ start,” Amis replied. “Ambitious young drunks, late at night, saying, ‘We’re not going to do that any more. We’re going to do this instead.’” And with this “gang” – which also included his great friend, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, and Ian McEwan – the young drunks went on to became “the old devils”, to borrow a Kingsley Amis title, that pretty much comprised the literary establishment for years.
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  • Of his instinct to shock, he observed: “Every novel worth reading is funny and serious. Anyone who’s any good is going to be funny. It’s the nature of life. Life is funny.”
  • “It seems to me a hilariously enjoyable way of spending one’s time,” he said. And so, at his daring comic best, he was great fun to read.
  • The insolence, the silliness, the seriousness, the grotesqueness, the erudition and audacity were all swept up in those inimitable sentences and corralled into order by his cleverness with form. As Enright summed up in her review: “Damn, that fool can write.
Javier E

'Life without consequences': the fraternity bros who built a multimillion-dollar drug r... - 0 views

  • uses the drug ring to show how the fraternity ethos shapes elite societies as a whole, beyond the College of Charleston: with impunity.
  • Marshall shows how being asked to join a fraternity means having a safe place to behave badly between high school and the job that frat puts you on the fast track towards. In his book, he quotes a Cornell Greek life website: “While only 2% of America’s population is involved in fraternities, 80% of Fortune 500 executives, 76% of US senators and congressmen, 85% of supreme court justices, and all but two presidents since 1825 have been fraternity men.”
  • the former fraternity members Marshall interviewed for Among the Bros said their experience selling drugs in college was good prep for their careers: “They’d say things like, ‘I learned supply chain economics, salesmanship, delegation and marketing.’” As a reader, it’s hard to not feel pangs of anger at how for some (“some” being young white men), recklessness could be a stepping stone to a six-figure salary.
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  • It’s hard to wrap your mind around men having fond memories of brutal treatment, but Marshall explained that it was not so simple as looking back on one event of hazing and condemning the entire system: “It’s almost a rational choice of thinking, ‘This was my entry into an oil and gas or real estate job. This is how I got into private equity or politics. And there’s always going to be a group of people who are always going to look out for me whenever I need a favor.’
  • And for those in the bubble, there’s an attitude that the more intense the hazing experience was, the better story you might have, the more other men will respect you.
  • Above all, Marshall’s book explores coming of age in a world that will not hold you accountable, even by law enforcement: “When you can get away with anything, it does lead to an arrested development. If you drive drunk and don’t go get a DUI, how do you learn not to drive drunk? If you commit a much worse crime and don’t get punished, how do you learn not to?”
  • All the men involved in Kappa Alpha’s drug ring were white – in fact, they were often described by their fellow students at the College of Charleston and law enforcement as looking like normal white boys. They were protected by wealthy parents, the best lawyers, and a “boys will be boys” culture. They were emboldened to test the boundaries of their privilege, and they came out with barely a scratch.
Javier E

Tween trends get more expensive as they take cues from social media - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • While earlier generations might have taken their cues from classmates or magazines, tweens and teens now see their peers on platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube.
  • And it’s spawning viral moments in retail, as evidenced by last week’s release of limited-edition Stanley tumblers at Target. Fans lined up outside stores before sunrise to nab the cup made in collaboration with Starbucks, and arguments broke out at a handful of locations. T
  • This age group also is snapping up pricey makeup and skin care, even products usually reserved for “mature” skin. That’s given rise to viral TikToks from exasperated adults.
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  • The mania behind these products is heightened by their collectability and the sense of connection they offer, industry experts say.“Material things have always been markers of identity,” Drenten said.
  • It’s also compounded by biology — puberty and cognitive development can feel upending and confusing, said Mindy Weinstein, the founder and chief executive of digital marketing company Market MindShift. So buying into a trend or product — perhaps popularized by older teens — can ease those uncomfortable feelings.
  • It’s known as the “bandwagon effect, and it’s really pronounced in that age group,
  • “they aren’t always sure where they fit into the world. But now by buying that [item] they feel like they fit in.
  • Every generation of tween has had products, accessories, brands and styles they covet. A decade ago, it was Justice clothing, colorful iPod minis, Sidekick cellphones and EOS lip balm. In the early 2000s, Juicy sweatsuits, North Face fleece jackets, Nike Shox, Abercrombie & Fitch and Razr flip phones reigned. In the ’90s it was buying from the Delia’s catalogue magazine, Lip Smacker balms, United Colors of Benetton and Tommy Hilfiger polos. The ’80s had Guess jeans, Keds, banana hair clips and J. Crew sweaters. In the ’70s it was mood rings, Wrangler and Levi’s jeans, Puma sneakers and Frye boots.
  • More than half of U.S. teenagers (ages 13 to 19) spend at least four hours a day on social media, according to Gallup, and most of that time is spent on YouTube and TikTok
  • And it’s highly effective — consumers are more likely to consider buying a product and have a favorable opinion about it if it went vira
  • “TikTok influencers already have their trust … teens and tweens see them and they want to also be into that trend and feel like they’re belonging to that social group,
  • It used to be that our hair, makeup and skin care products were only visible to those who entered our bedrooms, scanning vanities and opening drawers. Now, teens and tweens are filming “Get ready with me” videos, showing off their Rare Beauty liquid blush ($23), Laneige lip balm ($18) and Charlotte Tilbury setting spray ($38) as they complain about school or recap a friend’s bat mitzvah.
  • Margeaux Richmond and her friends spend a lot of time talking about skin care. The 12-year-old from Des Moines said she got a $62 Drunk Elephant moisturizer for Christmas. “It’s kind of pricey, but if it’s good for your skin it’s worth it,” she said. “It’s kind of important to me and my friends because we don’t want our skin to look bad or anything.”
  • This also fuels a collectability culture. The customer no longer wants one water bottle, one pair of Air Jordans, one Summer Fridays lip balm or one Nike sweatshirt — they want them in every color.
  • “We have to think about today’s consumers, not as consumers, but as fans; and fandom has always been intertwined with collecting,” Drenten said. “In today’s culture, particularly among young people, we’ve kind of shifted away from obsession with celebrities to obsession with brands.”
  • Having and displaying a collection on shelves and on social media is seen as a status symbol.
  • Superfans also collect accessories for some of these products, Briggs said, spawning a whole side industry for some products.
  • Who’s doing the actual buying is harder to track. Not all adolescents have jobs or parents who are able or willing to spend $550 on Apple AirPods Max or $275 on a Tiffany & Co’s Pink Double Heart Tag Pendant necklace. “These products, to some extent, are a point of privilege and status,
  • Some of the spending could be attributed to more young people in the workforce: Roughly 37 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds had a job or were looking for one last year,
  • That’s the highest rate since 2009.
  • Richmond said she uses her babysitting money to buy Drunk Elephant skin care or Kendra Scott jewelry — items “my parents won’t buy me.” She’s saving up for her second Stanley tumbler.
  • Drenten emphasized that shopping or gift hauls on social media don’t reflect what every teen or tween wants. It varies by socioeconomics, demographics and personal preference. “At the end of the day, they can still be influenced by who they’re around and not necessarily what they’re seeing as the top line products online.”
Javier E

Do We Have the Courage to Stop This? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.
  • Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries
  • American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.
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  • I understand: shooting is fun! But so is driving, and we accept that we must wear seat belts, use headlights at night, and fill out forms to buy a car. Why can’t we be equally adult about regulating guns?
  • don’t say that it won’t make a difference because crazies will always be able to get a gun. We’re not going to eliminate gun deaths, any more than we have eliminated auto accidents. But if we could reduce gun deaths by one-third, that would be 10,000 lives saved annually
  • Likewise, don’t bother with the argument that if more people carried guns, they would deter shooters or interrupt them. Mass shooters typically kill themselves or are promptly caught, so it’s hard to see what deterrence would be added by having more people pack heat. There have been few if any cases in the United States in which an ordinary citizen with a gun stopped a mass shooting.
  • The tragedy isn’t one school shooting, it’s the unceasing toll across our country. More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
  • Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands. The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings. In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half.
  • we can look for inspiration at our own history on auto safety. As with guns, some auto deaths are caused by people who break laws or behave irresponsibly. But we don’t shrug and say, “Cars don’t kill people, drunks do.” Instead, we have required seat belts, air bags, child seats and crash safety standards. We have introduced limited licenses for young drivers and tried to curb the use of mobile phones while driving. All this has reduced America’s traffic fatality rate per mile driven by nearly 90 percent since the 1950s.
Javier E

The Kids Are (Not) All Right-NYT - 0 views

  • According to a Unicef report issued last week — “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries” — the United States once again ranked among the worst wealthy countries for children, coming in 26th place of 29 countries included. Only Lithuania, Latvia and Romania placed lower, and those were among the poorest countries assessed in the study.
  • let’s start with the good news, or what little there is to glean from the report: the United States has one of the lowest rates of children reporting that they smoke regularly or have been drunk at least twice, and our children are among the most likely to exercise daily. We also have one of the lowest levels of air pollution.
  • the United States has the second highest share of children living under the relative poverty line, defined as 50 percent of each country’s median income, and the second largest “child poverty gap” (the distance between the poverty line and the median incomes of those below the line).
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  • The United States ranked 25th out of 29 in the percentage of people 15 to 19 years old who were enrolled in schools and colleges and 23rd in the percentage of people in that cohort not participating in either education, employment or training.
  • We have the highest teen fertility rate, and among the highest infant mortality rates. We have one of the lowest child immunization rates and lowest average birth weights.
  • Although our children were among the most likely to exercise, they were also the most overweight.
  • American children were in the bottom third when ranking their own level of “life satisfaction.” Our children were 28th out of 29 countries in ranking the quality of their relationships (the French were dead last). Only 56 percent of children in the United States find their classmates “kind and helpful,” 73 percent find it “easy to talk” to their mothers and 59 percent find it “easy to talk” to their fathers.
  • We have the third highest homicide rate among developed countries,
  • a third of parents fear for their children’s physical safety at school,
Javier E

E-Notes: American Exceptionalism… Exposed - 0 views

  • exceptionalism, a concept that is not sui generis, not very old, and not even American in conception, has come to serve as code for the American Civil Religion that dare not speak its name.
  • the principal reason to banish the term from historical discourse is that the icky, polysyllabic, Latinate moniker did not even exist until the mid-20th century! No Puritan colonist, no founding Patriot, no Civil War statesman, no 19th century poet, pastor, or propagandist employed the word.
  • far from believing their nation to be an exception to the rules of nature governing other men and nations, they both hoped their example would transform the whole world and feared that a lack of republican virtue would doom their experiment. In neither case would Americans stand apart from the rest of the human race.
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  • If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is “nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths.”[1] If it means that the U.S.A. was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the U.S.A. is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations—that (as Bismarck reportedly quipped) “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America”—then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall (“thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”) or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American Exceptionalism means that its power, values, and “indispensable” status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals, and allies alike are sure to push back.
  • it was probably just a matter of time before somebody turned the Stalinist term of derision into a patriotic badge of honor and ait stamped it over all of American history. As it happened, that somebody was Max Lerner, a former editor of The Nation turned Cold War liberal and author of the one-thousand page America as a Civilization (1957).
  • he concluded that “these distortions should not blind us to the valid elements in the theory of exceptionalism.... America represents, as I have stressed above, the naked embodiment of the most dynamic elements of modern Western history
  • Exceptionalism dovetailed perfectly with a new orthodoxy among political scientists that extolled what Harvard professor Louis Hartz called America’s Liberal Tradition.
  • the idea of an America set apart by Providence and endowed with a special mission to reform (not to say redeem) the whole human race dovetailed perfectly with the political rhetoric needed to rally Americans to lead the Free World in what amounted to a “holy war” against “godless Communism.”
  • Those were the years when the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” became a civilizational motto
  • Those were the years when presidential rhetoric became steeped in what sociologist Robert Bellah called “God-Talk,”
  • how come computerized word-searches show that references to American Exceptionalism exploded—literally from hundreds to tens of thousands—only after the Cold War was over?
  • the Cold War was over, globalization and multiculturalism were the new trends, and American identity got contested as never before. What made exceptionalist rhetoric ubiquitous was the fact it was now contested
  • the myth of American Exceptionalism, ironically inspired by Roman Catholics and Marxists, entered our lexicon as historical gloss for the campaign to persuade a skeptical, war-weary people that global commitments such as the UN, Truman Doctrine, and NATO were not really a break with tradition, but a fulfillment of the nation’s hoariest, holiest calling.
  • As early as 1630, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop implored his people ‘to Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.’”[12] I took for granted that my teachers and textbooks were right when they traced our national identity back to the Puritans beginning with Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity. Composed on board the ship Arbella bound for the New World, it seemed the elegant spiritual companion to the Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact.
  • he borrowed a New Testament image when he imagined New England as a city on a hill called to inspire the whole human race by its example.
  • the dogged literary excavations of historian Richard Gamble have now exposed it as myth. It turns out that Winthrop’s manuscript, far from serving as keynote address of the American pageant, was either unknown or forgotten until it turned up in the family archives in 1809. Donated to the New York Historical Society, it slept for another three decades before publication in a Massachusetts collection of colonial documents in 1838
  • The famous “City on a Hill” passage appears in the Sermon on the Mount as one in a list of metaphors Jesus uses to describe his disciples. He speaks of them as the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill, and a lamp not hidden under a bushel. The passage served as text for many a sermon preached by colonial divines, not least Jonathan Edwards. But those pastors were quoting the Bible to make theological points to Christian audiences; none was quoting Winthrop to make political points to American audiences. What has been lost “in the fierce crossfire of the battle to define the American identity,” Gamble writes, is “the story not of how the metaphor helped make America what it is today but the story of how America helped make the metaphor what it never was.”
  • not even the Puritans were “impelled by a unique or exceptional American impulse. On the contrary, they were products of European education, European culture, European piety, and they were engaged in a great European quarrel.
  • Americans have always been tempted to think that because they live in God’s Country they must be God’s Elect. Such faith has its uses, for instance to motivate a free and disparate people to rally and sacrifice in times of crisis. But it verges on idolatry from the standpoint of Biblical religion and—if exploited for partisan purposes—verges on heresy from the standpoint of civil religion.
Javier E

Donald Trump's Media Attacks Should Be Viewed as Brilliant | Time.com - 0 views

  • the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
  • the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.
  • the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.
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  • Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest.
  • he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
  • His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.
  • that’s not all the president is doing.
  • Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.
  • “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.
  • The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.
  • He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.
  • If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.
  • Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public
  • Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.To which the president replies:Many people have come out and said I’m right.
  • If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity.
  • “We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard,” Moynihan wrote.
  • I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.
  • It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina.
  • One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy.
  • Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.
  • The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
  • Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.
  • At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.
  • I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.
  • The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.
  • The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us.
  • And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived.
  • Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
  • Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.
  • The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.
  • In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists
  • They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
  • I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right.
  • Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining.
  • It is no less stunning to watch people once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.
  • And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.
  • There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.
  • This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.
  • We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.
  • Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.
  • The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.
Javier E

How to Beat Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • I was one of the many who admired the orderly commitment and resolution of the women’s march on Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration.
  • Yet my admiration is mixed with worry. As I step through the police lines, I bring a message with me: Your demonstrations are engineered to fail. They didn’t stop the Iraq war. They won’t stop Donald Trump.
  • With the rarest exceptions—and perhaps the January 21 demonstration will prove to be one—left-liberal demonstrations are exercises in catharsis, the release of emotions. Their operating principle is self-expression, not persuasion. They lack the means, and often the desire, to police their radical fringes, with the result that it’s the most obnoxious and even violent behavior that produces the most widely shared and memorable images of the event.
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  • Again and again, their most lasting effect has been to polarize opinion against them—and to empower the targets of their outrage. And this time, that target is a president hungering for any excuse to repress his opponents
  • Protesters may be up against something never before seen in American life: a president and an administration determined to seize on unrest to legitimate repression.
  • here’s what I have to offer from the right, amid the storms of the Trump era.
  • The more conservative protests are, the more radical they are.You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic.
  • It’s beyond audacious that a candidate who publicly requested help from Russian espionage services against his opponent would claim the flag as his own. But Trump is trying. Don’t let him get away with it. Carry the flag. Open with the Pledge of Allegiance. Close by singing the Star Spangled Banner
  • Trump’s presidency is itself one long flag-burning, an attack on the principles and institutions of the American republic. That republic’s symbols are your symbols. You should cherish them and brandish them.
  • Don’t get sucked into the futile squabbling cul-de-sac of intersectionality and grievance politics. Look at this roster of speakers from the January 21 march. What is Angela Davis doing there? Where are the military women, the women police officers, the officeholders? If Planned Parenthood is on the stage, pro-life women should stand there, too. If you want somebody to speak for immigrants, invite somebody who’s in the country lawfully.
  • Here are a few useful tests:a) Could this demand be achieved by a law passed through Congress?b) Can I imagine my Rush Limbaugh listening brother-in-law agreeing with it?c) Can I tweet it?If so … good.
  • “Tone policing” has entered the left-of-center vocabulary as one of the worst possible things you can do or think. In fact, all effective political communication must carefully consider both tone and content
  • The classic military formula for success: concentrate superior force at a single point
  • Successful movements are built upon concrete single demands that can readily be translated into practical action: “Votes for women.” “End the draft.” “Overturn Roe v. Wade.” “Tougher punishments for drunk driving.
  • People can say “yes” to such specific demands for many different reasons.
  • So it should be for critics of President Trump. “Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” “Divest from the companies.” These are limited asks with broad appeal.
  • On the other hand, if you build a movement that lists those specific and limited goals along a vast and endlessly unfolding roster of others from “preserve Dodd Frank” to “save the oceans”—if you indulge the puckish anti-politics of “not usually a sign guy, but geez”—you will collapse into factionalism and futility.
  • if you are building a movement to protect American democracy from the authoritarianism of the Trump administration, you should remember that the goal is to gain allies among people who would not normally agree with you
  • the core demand of your movement should likewise be easy to explain and plausibly acceptable to that mainstream, stretching from Bernie voters to Romney donors.
  • Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to wage a Nixon-style culture war: cops against criminals, soldiers against pacifists, hard hats against hippies. Don’t be complicit. If you want to beat him, you have to reject his categories.
  • bodies in the street represent only potential power, not actual power. Even the largest rally must sooner or later disassemble and return home. What happens after that? The difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party was that only the second movement translated the energy and excitement of its early mass meetings into steady organizational work aimed at winning elections.
  • it is the steady and often tedious work of organization that sustains democracy—and can change the world. Protests are useful mostly to the extent that they mobilize people to participate in the follow-up meetings to realize the protest’s goals. Collect names and addresses. Form Facebook groups. Keep in touch. Don’t argue: recruit. Meet in real space as well as online. Serve cake. Make your presence felt on your local elected officials not just once, but day after day, week in, week out.
  • to succeed, you should be equally focused and persistent. And that requires above all: be motivated by hope, not outrage.
  • The outrage may get you started, but only hope keeps you going. Hope, as Vaclav Havel insisted, is an expression of the state of our minds, not a description of the state of the world. It powers you to undertake the daunting but essential mission: unlimited efforts for limited goals.
  • ou’re not trying to save the world. Just to pass one law. It doesn’t sound like much. It could be everything.
Javier E

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of... - 1 views

  • The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.''
  • What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
  • That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
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  • This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.
  • has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. ''Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''
  • Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.
  • Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again.''
  • challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality.
  • By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants.
  • A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.
  • Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.
  • ''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''
  • , I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
  • The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
  • ''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''
  • George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does.
grayton downing

A Reason for Hope in Congo's Perpetual War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Still, the battle was a dramatic turnaround from barely a year ago, when the rebels had the upper hand. Ill-disciplined, corrupt and often drunk, the Congolese soldiers were only somewhat more popular than the mutineer rebels who had taken up arms against them.
  • “You cannot compare the present army with the army of yesterday,”
  • Last week, the negotiations broke down and fighting resumed. A spokesman for M23 said the Congolese military had started the latest round of fighting, but General Bahuma said they were only responding to a rebel attack.
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  • Last fall, after the rebels briefly overran Goma, the regional capital and a city of one million people, the United Nations peacekeeping forces here were exposed as little more than blue-helmeted mannequins.
  • The fighting in eastern Congo is one of the world’s most intractable, prolonged and deadly conflicts, claiming millions of lives over a decade and a half. The region is rich in gold and diamonds, and minerals like coltan and cassiterite, but instead of making its people wealthy they have only tempted invaders and local warlords. Goma, a bustling commercial hub on the Rwandan border, has been plagued by violence and poverty.
  • Last November, hundreds of rebels, machine guns on their backs, marched into Goma, setting off a national crisis. As Congolese soldiers retreated, they raped more than 102 women and 33 girls, some as young as 6, according to United Nations investigators. Riots erupted across Congo, even in the capital, Kinshasa, a thousand miles away, threatening the government of President Joseph Kabila.
Javier E

The Truth About Harvard - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the professor is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of grades he is a gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors face upward pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into law school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from within, from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism.
  • Not every class was so easy. Those that were tended to be in history and English, classics and foreign languages, art and philosophy—in other words, in those departments that provide what used to be considered the meat of a liberal arts education. Humanities students generally did the least work, got the highest grades, and cruised academically
  • the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once hypothesized that most professors oppose capitalism because they consider themselves far smarter than boobish businessmen, and therefore resent the economic system that rewards practical intelligence over their own gifts. I'm inclined to think that such resentment—at least in money-drunk America—increasingly coexists with a deep inferiority complex regarding modern capitalism, and a need, however unconscious, to justify academic life in the face of the fantastic accumulation of wealth that takes place outside the ivory tower.
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  • some areas of academic life aren't vulnerable to this crisis of confidence in the importance of one's work. Scientists can rest secure in the knowledge that their labors will help shove along the modern project of advancing health—and wealth.
  • Then there is economics, the new queen of the sciences—a discipline perfectly tailored to the modern market-driven university, and not coincidentally the most popular concentration
  • The humanities have no such reservoirs of confidence. And attempts by humanities professors to ape the rigor of their scientific colleagues have led to a decades-long wade in the marshes of postmodern academic theory, where canons are scorned, books exist only as texts to be deconstructed, and willfully obscure writing is championed over accessible prose. All this has merely reinforced capitalism's insistence that the sciences are the only important academic pursuits, because only they provide tangible, quantifiable (and potentially profitable) results. Far from making the humanities scientific, postmodernism has made them irrelevant.
  • The retreat into irrelevance is visible all across the humanities curriculum. Philosophy departments have largely purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists; history departments emphasize exhaustive primary research and micro-history. In the field of English there is little pretense that literature is valuable in itself and should be part of every educated person's life, rather than serving as grist for endless academic debates
  • Sure, historians believe in their primary sources, English scholars in their textual debates, philosophers in their logic games. But many of them seem to believe that they have nothing to offer students who don't plan to be historians, or literary theorists, or philosophers. They make no effort to apply their work to what should be the most pressing task of undergraduate education: to provide a general education, a liberal arts education, to future doctors and bankers and lawyers and diplomats.
  • In this environment who can blame professors if, when it comes time to grade their students, they sometimes take the path of least resistance—the path of the gentleman's B-plus?
  • the Core's mission statement asserts, with a touch of smugness, that "the Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information … rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education."
  • These words, which appear in the course catalogue each year, are the closest that Harvard comes to articulating an undergraduate educational philosophy. They suggest that the difference in importance between, say, "Democracy, Development, and Equality in Mexico" and "Reason and Faith in the West" (both offerings in Historical Study) does not matter. As the introduction to the history courses puts it, both courses offer a "historical" approach to knowledge that is presumably more valuable than mere "facts" about the past. Comprehending history "as a form of inquiry and understanding" trumps learning about actual events. The catalogue contains similarly pat introductions to the other disciplines. In each case the emphasis is squarely on methodology, not material.
  • The few Core classes that are well taught are swamped each year, no matter how obscure the subject matter. The closest thing to a Harvard education—that is, to an intellectual corpus that most Harvard graduates have in common—is probably obtained in such oversubscribed courses as "The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice," "First Nights: Five Performance Premieres," and "Fairy Tales, Children's Literature, and the Construction of Childhood."
  • As in a great library ravaged by a hurricane, the essential elements of a liberal arts education lie scattered everywhere at Harvard, waiting to be picked up. But little guidance is given on how to proceed with that task.
  • Harvard never attempted to answer that question—perhaps the most important question facing any incoming freshman. I chose my classes as much by accident as by design. There were times when some of them mattered to me, and even moments when I was intoxicated. But achieving those moments required pulling myself away from Harvard's other demands, whether social, extracurricular, or pre-professional, which took far more discipline than I was usually able to exert.
  • It was hard work to get into Harvard, and then it was hard work competing for offices and honors and extracurriculars with thousands of brilliant and driven young people; hard work keeping our heads in the swirling social world; hard work fighting for law-school slots and investment-banking jobs as college wound to a close … yes, all of that was heavy sledding. But the academics—the academics were another story.
  • What makes our age different is the moment that happened over and over again at Harvard, when we said This is going to be hard and then realized No, this is easy. Maybe it came when we boiled down a three-page syllabus to a hundred pages of exam-time reading, or saw that a paper could be turned in late without the frazzled teaching fellow's docking us, or handed in C-quality work and got a gleaming B-plus. Whenever the moment came, we learned that it wasn't our sloth alone, or our constant pushing for higher grades, that made Harvard easy. No, Harvard was easy because almost no one was pushing back.
Javier E

Palin wasn't "drunk" and her Trump speech wasn't "stupid": She's playing right into the... - 0 views

  • Traditionally, a political speech is an argument. It has a thesis, which is backed up with examples and organized in a coherent structure so that it has, or at least feels like it has, a logical flow to it
  • Palin isn’t trying to make an argument. That’s not her strong suit, and that’s not what audiences want from her. Her speech was more impressionistic than argumentative. She was there to push buttons and arouse passions, not get people thinking.
  • Palin understands, probably better than anyone besides Donald Trump, how thinking is the enemy of the conservative populist mission. What she wants is to make you feel, to have those feelings of bitterness and misplaced entitlement wash over the crowds until they are screaming for more blood. In this, she succeeded.
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  • Palin understands what other Republicans are just beginning to get, which is that the conservative base is an audience that is post-argument. Conservatism of the 21st century is an ideology built on sand. Its arguments fall apart upon the briefest of examination and the supposed “evidence” for their beliefs are mostly lies and self-delusions.
  • Sticking with the argument and evidence-based structure in the era of climate change denialism and creationism is a fool’s game and Palin knows it. Better instead to focus strictly on emotions and tribal identity, eschewing not just argument but even structuring your speeches to resemble arguments.
  • other Republicans are quickly following on her heels. During the sixth Republican debate, for instance, there was a noticeable scramble away from trying to make actual policy claims and promises, especially with regards to foreign policy, and an embrace of this content-free imagistic language.
  • Cruz riles people up, because riling people up is good, because they enjoy being riled up, and Obama fails at the task of riling you up (because he doesn’t want to rile you up over a non-issue like this, of course).
  • To be clear, emotion is not always or even usually the enemy of logic. In the traditional political speech, audiences are encouraged to tie their emotions to argument. You are angry, here is the solution. You want hope, these policies will provide it
  • But Palin, by eliding the argument-based structure of traditional speeches, is getting past this altogether. Anger is turned into hate is turned into more anger, until it spins off, completely unmoored from any considerations like “why” or “how.” Her innovation helps Republicans get over the logic and evidence problems that plague them. And so we can expect her methods to become more, not less prevalent over time.
Javier E

Dinesh D'Souza's cramped quarters in the Ideas Industry - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • both Frum and D’Souza changed since the 1980s, but they have tacked in different directions.
  • Frum still identifies as a conservative. But he opposed Barack Obama without thinking of him as un-American or the devil incarnate. For that act of moderation, he lost some affiliations but cemented his status as a heterodox public intellectual during a time when folks only wanted to hear from partisan thought leaders.
  • So is this merely a tale of one intellectual losing power while drifting toward the center while another intellectual is gaining power by becoming more partisan? No, because there are few tidy endings in “The Ideas Industry.”
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  • In a review of his book on Obama’s governing philosophy, The Weekly Standard castigated D’Souza for “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” D’Souza’s later books received praise from some politicians, such as Newt Gingrich. Conservative intellectuals, however, largely disowned or ignored D’Souza’s theses
  • I discussed D’Souza’s (d)evolution in “The Ideas Industry” as “modern exemplar of a successful partisan intellectual.” To elaborate further:
  • Frum remains a well-read columnist in the Atlantic who frequently writes essays that engage intellectuals from all sides. D’Souza lost the respect of intellectuals across the political spectrum  more than a decade ago. The only reason any serious person engages with D’Souza in 2018 is to perform the intellectual equivalent of telling the loudmouth drunk at the end of the bar to shut up about his crackpot Kennedy assassination theories.
  • Once you migrate into the ultra-partisan corner, there really is no way out. D’Souza pretty much acknowledged this to The Washington Post during the Washington premiere of “Death of a Nation,” saying, “I would love to reach the middle-of-the-road guy, the guy on the fence. But I also am realistic enough to recognize that it’s going to be predominantly Republicans and conservatives who come to the film.”
  • D’Souza has morphed from an intellectual into an entrepreneur. He has had some success with his right-wing propaganda films.
Javier E

More Thoughts on Guns and Culture - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

  • As someone who spent a whole career in public health working to reduce tobacco use, I’ve long thought part of the answer to the gun problem is to denormalize gun use and gun ownership. This is what happened in many ways with tobacco, probably the biggest instance being restrictions on smoking indoors, which in addition to protecting innocent bystanders from carcinogens, greatly reduced the social utility of cigarettes and changed the smoker’s image, both to himself and others. (Open carry is the gun equivalent of reversing this process).
  • I’d like to see some deep thinkers researching how to do that with firearms. It will be hard, given the glorification of guns in so much of society, including mass media, but then, cigarettes once were treated the same way (with the help of paid placement from cigarette makers).
  • we are not collectively powerless in the face of culture. We know this from the evolution of perceptions of drunk driving, smoking, domestic violence and numerous other de-valorized activities. We reify cultural norms in laws and laws, along with the behaviors they shape in turn, changes culture.
Javier E

Brexit - the niche production that truly brought the house down | Marina Hyde | Opinion... - 0 views

  • Theresa May is hoping MPs will look again at her withdrawal agreement next week in Meaningful Vote 3. Sure, they saw it lurching around the bar earlier and thought there was no way in a million years they were going home with it. But this close to tipping-out time, are they drunk enough to panic-buy? If the answer turns out to be yes, the prime minister’s various earlier losses this week will be hailed momentarily as tactically astute
  • Think of it as a sort of Crap Negotiations World Cup. Theresa May doesn’t want to finish top of the group or her Brexit will face the Treaty of Versailles in the semis.
  • Take Stephen Barclay, the unknown who was recently cast as Brexit secretary on the basis that he met the role’s single criterion: looking like you could snap a towel in a locker-room, then go, “Don’t be a girl, mate!
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