Why the West Misunderstood Putin - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Anagnorisis is that moment of recognition when a character in a play finally understands their predicament and who they really are.
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It is Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII realizing that he has “ventured … this many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth,” or Richard II saying, “I have wasted time and now doth time waste me.”
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Three explanations loom. One has to do with personalities and characters.
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The Closing of the American Mind: A Summary - 0 views
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Preface
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“No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20
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A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21
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A Great Man Got Arrested as President - WSJ - 0 views
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A thing that always fascinates is a quality Grant had that left close observers balancing in their minds two different and opposite thoughts. One: There is nothing special in this plain, quiet, undistinguished fellow. The other: He is marked by destiny; something within him encompasses the epic working out of fate, even of nations.
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The obscure former soldier and unsuccessful farmer would become, over two or three years, the only indispensable man in the Union after Lincoln. Then, all worlds conquered, he would lose everything in a cascade of misfortunes that yielded . . . a final and transcendent human triumph.
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Why do we remember greatness? What purpose is there in remembering? To remind us who we’ve been. To remind us what’s still lurking there in the national DNA.
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Book Review: 'Freedom's Dominion,' by Jefferson Cowie - The New York Times - 0 views
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Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University, traces Wallace’s repressive creed to his birthplace, Barbour County, in Alabama’s southeastern corner, where the cry of “freedom” was heard from successive generations of settlers, slaveholders, secessionists and lynch mobs through the 19th and 20th centuries. The same cry echoes today in the rallies and online invective of the right
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though Cowie keeps his focus on the past, his book sheds stark light on the present. It is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government.
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“Freedom’s Dominion” is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest.
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Unlimited guilt, hubris, arrogance - and The Tragic Mind | by David Wineberg | The Stra... - 0 views
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The book is a purge, a catharsis, a way for others to understand and avoid making his big mistake. It focuses on tragedy, not the death of thousands, but the self-discovery by the hero of powerlessness, of fear in place of bold moves, of human failings clouding global accomplishments
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“Tragedy is not fatalism; nor is it related to the quietism of the Stoics. It is comprehension. By thinking tragically, one is made aware of all of one’s limitations, and thus can act with more effectiveness.”
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Kaplan discovers that the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare differed in one major way: the Greeks laid all the fault at the feet of the gods. It was the gods’ unchallengeable decisions that led to continual tragedie
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Plagues of the Body and Plagues of the Mind - The Bulwark - 0 views
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Though Pamuk is playful where Tolstoy is strident, behind all the beautiful descriptions of Mingherian flowers and mountains of rose-colored marble, he is undeniably making an argument. If Tolstoy’s great theme in War and Peace is the powerlessness of humanity to remake the world through acts of will alone, Pamuk’s is the role of accident in shaping history and its writing. Tolstoy’s enemy was Napoleon, the embodiment of modernity’s hubris. Pamuk’s is the historiographic crimes of nationalism.
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Mingheria becomes independent not only through the great accident of the plague, but also through thousands of tiny accidents at crucial moments. The problem with nations, the book suggests, is that they take all these small instances in which things could just as well have been otherwise and cast them as a monumental inevitability. Once a nation-state comes into existence, the machinery of education and civic ritual and the instruments of propaganda and state violence are wielded to turn chance into fate. And that fate becomes inexorable.
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This is a bold thing to say in Turkey, a country that has gone to great lengths to promulgate a heroic and highly sanitized account of its founding. It is even bolder when one notes that Mingheria’s struggle for independence, and its troubled post-independence history, function very well as an allegory of Turkey itself. Major Kâmil is, like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an Ottoman war hero and secularist who tries to found a country divided by ethnic and religious rivalries on a conception of linguistic and ethnic nationalism.
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Opinion | Blue Lives Matter and How the Thin Blue Line Came to Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views
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a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.
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as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.
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First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.
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Opinion | A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It. - The New York Times - 0 views
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. I have studied and written about authoritarianism for years, and I think it’s important to pay attention to the views and motivations of voters who support authoritarian politicians, even when these politicians are seen by many as threats to the democratic order.
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My curiosity isn’t merely intellectual. Around the world, these politicians are not just getting elected democratically; they are often retaining enough popular support after a term — or two or three — to get re-elected. Polls strongly suggest that Trump has a reasonable chance of winning another term in November.
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Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?
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Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek? - by Bill Coberly - 0 views
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WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF WE CAN’T even trust the institutions in our imagined utopias?
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Starfleet’s exact role was left intentionally vague in the original series (1966–69); the writer’s guide for the original Star Trek explicitly encourages writers to “stay away from it as much as possible,” partly to avoid getting into the details of Earth’s future politics. But by the time of Star Trek’s heyday in the mid-1990s, Starfleet was established as an elite institution composed of brilliant and dedicated people (human and otherwise) who served in an organization resembling NASA, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Department of State all bundled together, with all of the opportunities for incoherence and mission creep that jumble implies.
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One of the greatest episodes of Deep Space Nine (1992–99), “In the Pale Moonlight,” is entirely about how, in times of crisis, moral compromise may be necessary, even for Starfleet. But such cases are treated as exceptional, unusual circumstances far beyond the norm; as a rule, Starfleet is good, and the best way to be a good servant of the true and just in the world of Star Trek is by being a good Starfleet officer. How does one be a good Starfleet officer? By doing one’s job, by being a professional, by following one’s duty.
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10 Senators Could Have Stopped Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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There are many explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.”
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None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The excuses ranged widely
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On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be raised to these seven.
Gary Shteyngart: Crying Myself to Sleep on the Icon of the Seas - The Atlantic - 0 views
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now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status.
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No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.
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There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.
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I Am Sorry But Joe Biden Crushed It in Michigan - 0 views
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Damon Linker has the most thoughtful meditation I’ve read on Aaron Bushnell, the airman who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy this weekend.
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before we get to that, I want to put in front of you Linker’s definition of small-l liberalism:
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I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.
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Opinion | The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule - The New York Times - 0 views
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The literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour has described the expectation of apocalypse — the sense that all history’s catastrophes and geopolitical traumas are leading us to “the prospect of an even more devastating futurity” — as the quintessential modern attitude. It’s visible everywhere in what has come to be known as the polycrisis.
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Climate anxiety, of the sort expressed by that student, is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.”
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The conviction that the human species could be on its way out, extinguished by our own selfishness and violence, may well be the last bipartisan impulse.
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Opinion | When the Right Ignores Its Sex Scandals - The New York Times - 0 views
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Late last month, the Southern Baptist Convention settled a sex abuse lawsuit brought against a man named Paul Pressler for an undisclosed sum. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 and alleged that Pressler had raped a man named Duane Rollins for decades, with the rapes beginning when Rollins was only 14 years old.
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Pressler is one of the most important American religious figures of the 20th century. He and his friend Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, are two of the key architects of the so-called conservative resurgence within the S.B.C.
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The conservative resurgence was a movement conceived in the 1960s and launched in the 1970s that sought to wrest control of the S.B.C. from more theologically liberal and moderate voices. It was a remarkable success. While many established denominations were liberalizing, the S.B.C. lurched to the right and exploded in growth, ultimately becoming the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
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A happiness expert's frank advice for Joe Biden - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the ancient Hindu teaching on the stages of life, or ashramas, and the advice I received from a guru in southern India named Nochur Venkataraman. He taught me that many successful people get stuck in a stage called Grihastha—which is where you enjoy professional success and adulation—rather than progressing to Vanaprastha, which is where one should become more of a teacher (“crystallized intelligence”).
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But there’s one more stage nearer the end called Sannyasa, which is to be fully enlightened and not working in the worldly domain. That transition is also sticky for many people—politicians, CEOs, sports figures, perhaps even the president—who struggle to stop doing what made them famous and admired. But that is the essence of truly retiring, and retiring well.
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Matt: The United States seems to have the persistent problem of a geriatric ruling class. What’s your analysis of why that appears in our political elite?
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This Is Why You're Exhausted by Politics - 0 views
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You and I, sitting on the side that would like to preserve liberal democracy, are exhausted. The people lined up across the way, the ones who want to transition to illiberalism? They are energized.
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Damon is right that we are on the cusp of something new. But where he sees it as the dawning of a new epoch, I believe we are on the cusp of a revolution.2
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views on policy are merely the ornaments on a wholesale reimagining of government as a tool for minority rule and a rejection of the rule of law.3
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Opinion | The Reason People Aren't Telling Joe Biden the Truth - The New York Times - 0 views
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They entered with courage and exited as cowards. In the past two weeks, several leaders have told me they arrived at meetings with President Biden planning to have serious discussions about whether he should withdraw from the 2024 election. They all chickened out.
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There’s a gap between what people say behind the president’s back and what they say to his face. Instead of dissent and debate, they’re falling victim to groupthink.
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According to the original theory, groupthink happens when people become so cohesive and close-knit that they put harmony above honesty. Extensive evidence has debunked that idea
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