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Javier E

How Silicon Valley breeds boredom, loneliness and vanity - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Well before smartphones, new inventions shaped our culture and our emotions, and changed how we feel about vanity, loneliness and boredom. Today, Silicon Valley is the latest to exploit these feelings in an effort to keep us harnessed to our screens.
  • For centuries, moralists preached that pride and vanity were deadly sins. Humans shouldn’t boast or think too much of themselves because they were fallible. Likewise, Americans were taught to regard their accomplishments as hollow and fleeting because life was short.
  • popular technologies of the 19th century challenged these mores and helped inculcate new ones.
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  • these technologies helped to alter attitudes about self-presentation and self-promotion. They trained Americans to focus on themselves, perfect their images and present themselves to others in words and pictures.
  • The spread of mass-produced mirrors in the late 19th century had a similar effect, enabling rich and poor alike to study their images, and try to perfect them.
  • After photography was introduced to the United States in 1839, it took off quickly, and Americans flocked to photographers’ studios.
  • technology companies promised consumers that if they purchased telephones, radios and phonographs, they need never feel lonesome again.
  • By the 1930s, editorialists were declaring that “Vanity is Sanity,” for well-adjusted individuals should care about their image and try to look their best. Lack of interest in one’s appearance signaled psychological problems
  • Whereas vanity had once been a sin, it now became a requirement for social success.
  • Our 19th-century forebears were resigned to the fact that they would sometimes be alone
  • Being lonely wasn’t pleasurable, but it wasn’t surprising or particularly worrisome, either. And like Henry David Thoreau, many even celebrated it, recasting it as solitude
  • Over the course of the 20th century, however, Americans gradually pathologized the experience of being alone
  • they increased the pressure on Americans to publicly celebrate their appearances and accomplishments.
  • In the 1940s, the word “loner” emerged as a pejorative description
  • the term solitude fell out of favor while the word loneliness came into wider use, reflecting a growing consensus that there was something wrong and even shameful about being alone
  • We are also obsessed with our phones because so many of us regard loneliness and boredom as pathologies with potentially negative consequences for our health
  • Before the mid-19th century Americans never experienced boredom, for the word didn't exist in English
  • , after the word boredom was coined, it spread, and during the late 19th century, it was increasingly used to describe the inner experience of empty moments
  • By the mid-20th century, psychologists were suggesting that boredom was a measurable problem and that individuals were entitled to diversion in daily life, a message which movie studios, radio producers, television tycoons and merchants eagerly took up
  • Americans soon began to regard it as a dangerous emotion that ought to be stamped out as quickly as possible.
  • the people who were pushing photography, telephones, radios, movies and other consumer goods did so by exploiting shifting mores around vanity, loneliness and boredom
  • they also exacerbated them, reinforcing the belief that people should present their best faces to the world and the conviction that they should always be in contact, and never be bored or unstimulated.
  • these ideas have become central to our daily lives. We harbor fewer reservations about vanity than our ancestors
  • We turn to our phones because we have become accustomed to celebrating ourselves, and to seek out the affirmation of others.
  • Radios and phonographs, likewise, came to fill the silences in American homes, creating a sense of companionship at all times.
  • these emotions are now considered feelings to be cured rather than endured.
  • we use our phones to seek out constant companionship and unending entertainment.
  • because we worry more about loneliness and boredom than our ancestors did, we’re more apt to turn to our phones since they promise to relieve these afflictions.
  • it’s important to remember that the vulnerabilities Silicon Valley exploits are far from inevitable and are instead a result of culture and history
  • The way our culture trains us to experience vanity, loneliness and boredom can be changed. We can shift our thinking to recognize the value of humility, of solitude and of empty moments
Javier E

To move on, consign Boris Johnson and his vanity to spam - 0 views

  • Some voters, we should admit, enthused about Johnson because he made them laugh. I am haunted by the memory of a woman who told a BBC radio interviewer back in 2018: “I want Boris to become Tory leader because he will make politics fun!” But politics, and especially government, is not meant to be fun.
  • He is perhaps the most selfish human being I have ever met, indifferent to the welfare of anyone save himself. It is striking that he has few, if any, personal friends. He demands loyalty, but is incapable of giving it to others. He has neither principles nor personal convictions, save about his own ambitions and desires. Far from being the genial Mr Nice Guy he seeks to project, Tony Soprano would find him a tad ruthless.
  • He is a stranger to truth, a lifelong liar about big things and small.
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  • A decade or two ago, while many foreigners did not especially like the British, they respected us as sensible, decent people who made our society work. Today, that sentiment has vanished, swept away by Johnson and Liz Truss, his own unworthy nominee to succeed himself.
  • At the end of Act 2 of Henry IV Part 2, jesting Falstaff pleads with Prince Hal not to “banish plump Jack”. The prince coldly answered: “I do. I will.” When the crown was placed upon Henry’s brow, the comedy of the fat charlatan was indeed played out, the scoundrel banished.
  • The Conservative Party, and the British people, have been very foolish to humour their own Falstaff through these past sorry years. If they cannot banish plump Boris now, they sacrifice all hope of regaining the respect for Britain which has been sacrificed to his cavorting.
Javier E

Eunuchs of the Universe: Tom Wolfe on Wall Street Today - Newsweek and The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • Tom Wolfe headlines Newsweek’s first digital-only issue with a return to Wall Street 25 years after his classic novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Read his searing indictment of how the world of finance went wrong and who the new Masters of the Universe are.
Javier E

A New Generation's Vanity, Heard Through Hit Lyrics - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popula
  • r music
  • the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.
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  • “Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,”
  • The researchers find that hit songs in the 1980s were more likely to emphasize happy togetherness, like the racial harmony sought by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder in “Ebony and Ivory” and the group exuberance promoted by Kool & the Gang: “Let’s all celebrate and have a good time.” Diana Ross and Lionel Richie sang of “two hearts that beat as one,” and John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” emphasized the preciousness of “our life together.” Today’s songs, according to the researchers’ linguistic analysis, are more likely be about one very special person: the singer. “I’m bringing sexy back,” Justin Timberlake proclaimed in 2006. The year before, Beyoncé exulted in how hot she looked while dancing — “It’s blazin’, you watch me in amazement.” And Fergie, who boasted about her “humps” while singing with the Black Eyed Peas, subsequently released a solo album in which she told her lover that she needed quality time alone: “It’s personal, myself and I.”
  • a meta-analysis published last year in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Dr. Twenge and Joshua D. Foster looked at data from nearly 50,000 students — including the new data from critics — and concluded that narcissism has increased significantly in the past three decades.
  • Their song-lyrics analysis shows a decline in words related to social connections and positive emotions (like “love” or “sweet”) and an increase in words related to anger and antisocial behavior (like “hate” or “kill”).
redavistinnell

Requiem for the Bush Dynasty | Vanity Fair - 0 views

  • Requiem for the Bush Dynasty
  • The prospect that voters would pick three presidents from two generations of just one family always struck plenty of politicos as at least one Bush too far.
  • On Saturday evening, Bush dropped out of the presidential race after a disappointing finish in South Carolina, a state that had once been so kind to his father and brother.
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  • As other campaigns scrambled to raise money, Bush’s PAC had money to burn, and burn it they did, mailing small video players with a 15-minute Jeb! documentary pre-downloaded to voters in New Hampshire, and buying digital billboard space in Iowa, where Bush wound up spending nearly $3,000 a vote and finishing in sixth place.
  • And to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s putdown of his rival Clement Atlee, Bush had “a lot to be modest about.”
  • Paunchy or skinny, with glasses or without, Bush ran a joyless, self-conscious, disembodied campaign in which he always seemed to be looking at his watch, as his father so famously did in his 1992 town hall debate against Bill Clinton
  • Bush had his moments, chief among them a brave and principled argument that Donald Trump’s rampant anti-immigrant stance is not only bad policy but bad politics for his Republican Party, which needs Latino voters more than ever.
  • Four years later, on the morning of Jeb’s second, winning try at the job, the elder Bush so dreaded a possible encore that he confessed to his Secret Service agent, “I am one pathetic nervous wreck,” and told his old friend the journalist Hugh Sidey that he didn’t want to be with Jeb if he lost, “because it would hurt him even more to have us there.”
  • Yet no epitaph for Bush’s effort could be simpler or truer than the words uttered by one of his longtime advisers on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. “We’re in striking distance in New Hampshire,” he told me with a bit of excessive optimism, before adding with dead-eyed aim: “But they’re not buying what we’re selling this year.”
dytonka

AOC hints at interest in seeking higher office in Vanity Fair interview | Fox News - 0 views

  • Many have speculated the 31-year-old left-wing icon may be a contender for the 2024 presidential race, as she will have reached the mandatory age minimum of 35 by then.
  • "I don't know," she said in April. "Honestly, this news cycle is so insane, who knows where any of us are going to be in 2022?"
  • Ocasio-Cortez gained attention in the Democratic Party with her Green New Deal, though whether her popularity gained by going after the Trump administration and her new progressive proposals is enough to push her through a national campaign is unclear at this time.
Javier E

What Does Peter Thiel Want? - Persuasion - 0 views

  • Of the many wealthy donors working to shape the future of the Republican Party, none has inspired greater fascination, confusion, and anxiety than billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. 
  • Thiel’s current outlook may well make him a danger to American democracy. But assessing the precise nature of that threat requires coming to terms with his ultimate aims—which have little to do with politics at all. 
  • Thiel and others point out that when we lift our gaze from our phones and related consumer products to the wider vistas of human endeavor—breakthroughs in medicine, the development of new energy sources, advances in the speed and ease of transportation, and the exploration of space—progress has indeed slowed to a crawl.
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  • It certainly informed his libertarianism, which inclined in the direction of an Ayn Rand-inspired valorization of entrepreneurial superman-geniuses whose great acts of capitalistic creativity benefit all of mankind. Thiel also tended to follow Rand in viewing the masses as moochers who empower Big Government to crush these superman-geniuses.
  • Thiel became something of an opportunistic populist inclined to view liberal elites and institutions as posing the greatest obstacle to building an economy and culture of dynamistic creativity—and eager to mobilize the anger and resentment of “the people” as a wrecking ball to knock them down. 
  • the failure of the Trump administration to break more decisively from the political status quo left Thiel uninterested in playing a big role in the 2020 election cycle.
  • Does Thiel personally believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump? I doubt it. It’s far more likely he supports the disruptive potential of encouraging election-denying candidates to run and helping them to win.
  • Thiel is moved to indignation by the fact that since 1958 no commercial aircraft (besides the long-decommissioned Concorde) has been developed that can fly faster than 977 kilometers per hou
  • Thiel is, first and foremost, a dynamist—someone who cares above all about fostering innovation, exploration, growth, and discovery.
  • the present looks and feels pretty much the same as 1969, only “with faster computers and uglier cars.” 
  • Thiel’s approach to the problem is distinctive in that he sees the shortfall as evidence of a deeper and more profound moral, aesthetic, and even theological failure. Human beings are capable of great creativity and invention, and we once aspired to achieve it in every realm. But now that aspiration has been smothered by layer upon layer of regulation and risk-aversion. “Legal sclerosis,” Thiel claimed in that same book review, “is likely a bigger obstacle to the adoption of flying cars than any engineering problem.”
  • Progress in science and technology isn’t innate to human beings, Thiel believes. It’s an expression of a specific cultural or civilizational impulse that has its roots in Christianity and reached a high point during the Victorian era of Western imperialism
  • Thiel aims to undermine the progressive liberalism that dominates the mainstream media, the federal bureaucracy, the Justice Department, and the commanding heights of culture (in universities, think tanks, and other nonprofits).
  • In Thiel’s view, recapturing civilizational greatness through scientific and technological achievement requires fostering a revival of a kind of Christian Prometheanism (a monotheistic variation on the rebellious creativity and innovation pursued by the demigod Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology)
  • Against those who portray modern scientific and technological progress as a rebellion against medieval Christianity, Thiel insists it is Christianity that encourages a metaphysical optimism about transforming and perfecting the world, with the ultimate goal of turning it into “a place where no accidents can happen” and the achievement of “personal immortality” becomes possible
  • All that’s required to reach this transhuman end is that we “remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.” 
  • As Thiel put it last summer in a wide-ranging interview with the British website UnHerd, the Christian world “felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology—a Christian vision of history.”
  • JD Vance is quoted on the subject of what this political disruption might look like during a Trump presidential restoration in 2025. Vance suggests that Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop [him], stand before the country, and say, ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
  • Another Thiel friend and confidante discussed at length in Vanity Fair, neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, takes the idea of disrupting the liberal order even further, suggesting various ways a future right-wing president (Trump or someone else) could shake things up, shredding the smothering blanket of liberal moralism, conformity, rules, and regulations, thereby encouraging the creation of something approaching a scientific-technological wild west, where innovation and experimentation rule the day. Yarvin’s preferred path to tearing down what he calls the liberal “Cathedral,” laid out in detail on a two-hour Claremont Institute podcast from May 2021, involves a Trump-like figure seizing dictatorial power in part by using a specially designed phone app to direct throngs of staunch supporters (Jan. 6-style) to overpower law enforcement at key locations around the nation’s capital.  
  • this isn’t just an example of guilt-by-association. These are members of Thiel’s inner circle, speaking publicly about ways of achieving shared goals. Thiel funded Vance’s Senate campaign to the tune of at least $15 million. Is it likely the candidate veered into right-wing radicalism with a Vanity Fair reporter in defiance of his campaign’s most crucial donor?
  • As for Yarvin, Thiel continued to back his tech start up (Urbit) after it became widely known he was the pseudonymous author behind the far-right blog “Unqualified Reservations,” and as others have shown, the political thinking of the two men has long overlapped in numerous other ways. 
  • He’s deploying his considerable resources to empower as many people and groups as he can, first, to win elections by leveraging popular disgust at corrupt institutions—and second, to use the power they acquire to dismantle or even topple those institutions, hopefully allowing a revived culture of Christian scientific-technological dynamism to arise from out of the ruins.  
  • Far more than most big political donors, Thiel appears to care only about the extra-political goal of his spending. How we get to a world of greater dynamism—whether it will merely require selective acts of troublemaking disruption, or whether, instead, it will ultimately involve smashing the political order of the United States to bits—doesn’t really concern him. Democratic politics itself—the effort of people with competing interests and clashing outlooks to share rule for the sake of stability and common flourishing—almost seems like an irritant and an afterthought to Peter Thiel.
  • What we do have is the opportunity to enlighten ourselves about what these would-be Masters of the Universe hope to accomplish—and to organize politically to prevent them from making a complete mess of things in the process.
Javier E

The Axis of Ennui - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.
  • Joel Kotkin identified America’s epicenters of economic dynamism in a study for the Manhattan Institute. It is like a giant arc of unfashionableness. You start at the Dakotas where unemployment rates are at microscopic levels. You drop straight down through the energy belts of the Great Plains until you hit Texas. Occasionally, you turn to touch the spots where fertilizer output and other manufacturing plants are on the rebound, like the Third Coast areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Northern Florida.
  • the revolution in oil and gas extraction has led to 1.7 million new jobs in the United States alone, a number that could rise to three million by 2020. The shale revolution added $62 billion to federal revenues in 2012. At the same time, carbon-dioxide emissions are down 13 percent since 2007, as gas is used instead of coal to generate electricity.
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  • Vanity Fair still ranks the tech and media moguls and calls it The New Establishment, but, as Kotkin notes, the big winners in the current economy are the “Material Boys” — the people who grow grain, drill for fuel and lay pipeline. The growing parts of the world, meanwhile, are often the commodity belts, resource-rich places with good rule of law like Canada, Norway and Australia.
  • Most of us have grown up in a world in which oil states in the Middle East could throw their weight around because of their grip on the economy’s life source. But the power of petro-states is on the wane. Yergin argues that the oil sanctions against Iran may not have been sustainable if not for the new alternate sources of supply.
  • What are the names of the people who are leading this shift? Who is the Steve Jobs of shale? Magazine covers don’t provide the answers. Whoever they are, they don’t seem hungry for celebrity or good with the splashy project launch
Javier E

Trump's success with evangelical voters isn't surprising. It was inevitable. - The Wash... - 0 views

  • On the face of it, the affinity seems improbable. Why would religious-right voters with an interest in biblical values support a vulgar, twice-divorced, thrice-married billionaire with no understanding of the sacraments, who discerns no need for confession and who says he’s a Presbyterian but claims membership at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, a congregation affiliated with the Reformed Church in America?
  • The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion
  • Evangelicals in the 19th century marched in the vanguard of social-reform movements aimed at improving the lot of those on the margins of society.
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  • After the Scopes Trial of 1925, though, evangelicals turned inward
  • Many white evangelicals tilted toward the right in the 1950s and 1960s – nascent Cold War fears of godless communism and Billy Graham’s public friendship with Richard Nixon doubtlessly contributed
  • but a counter-movement of progressive evangelicals arose in the late 1960s in opposition to the Vietnam War and in favor of racial reconciliation and women’s equality. Their signature document, the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, was drafted in November 1973, and many evangelicals relished the opportunity to vote for one of their own, Jimmy Carter, in 1976.
  • The real catalyst for the formation of the religious right was the attempt to defend against Internal Revenue Service attempts to rescind the tax exemption of racially segregated institutions, especially Bob Jones University and Jerry Falwell’s segregated Liberty Christian Academy in the 1970s. Their anger at the federal government for challenging their tax status drove them into the waiting arms of activists like Weyrich,
  • In the ensuing decades, evangelicals became the most reliable constituency of the Republican Party, much the way that labor unions once sustained the Democratic Party
  • But the price of evangelicals’ betrayal of their biblical commitments was fearsome. When Reagan rejigged the tax codes to favor the wealthy, most evangelicals fell silent, despite the biblical warnings against the corruptions of wealth and injunctions to care for the indigent.
  • hen George W. Bush launched two vanity wars that would not meet even the barest criteria for just warfare, criteria honed by Christian thinkers over centuries, evangelicals, with rare exceptions, registered no objections and even cheered the invasions.
  • When I was writing “Thy Kingdom Come” during the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency, I searched in vain for a single religious-right organization willing to condemn the use of torture.
  • In a word, they secularized, trading their fidelity to the Bible and their own heritage of social activism for what amounted to a mess of pottage, the illusion of political influence
  • Rather than echoing the biblical cries for justice and peace and equality, they settled for the claptrap of hard-right political orthodoxy and thereby became just another interest group, a political entity susceptible to the panderings of politicians.
Javier E

No Racial Barrier Left to Break (Except All of Them) - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We now live in a post-assimilation America. The 50-year-old rules for racial advancement are obsolete. There is no racial barrier left to break. There is no office in the land to which an African-American can ascend — from mayor to attorney general and the presidency — that will serve as a magical platform for saving black people and our nation’s soul from its racist past.
  • We cannot engineer a more equitable nation simply by dressing up institutions in more shades of brown. Instead, we must confront structural racism and the values of our institutions.
  • the exceptionalism of Mr. Obama’s biography couldn’t save us from the Tea Party revolution, Republican obstructionism, police brutality, voter suppression and Islamophobia.
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  • We now know that no individual, no matter how singular, can bend the moral arc of the universe. Not even Dr. King could.
  • In his last book, in 1967, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” Dr. King warned that the movement was already hobbled by delusion. “The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro,” he wrote. “They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
  • He urged us to become “creative dissenters” and hold the country “to a higher destiny.”
  • So what does creative dissent look like in a post-assimilation America?
  • We must recognize that institutions are far more powerful than individuals, no matter how many people of color can be counted in leadership.
  • In addition, history matters. Black people in charge of, or embedded in, institutions that have not atoned for their history of racism can make it easier for those institutions to ignore or dismiss present-day claims of racial bias. That’s because the path to leadership has often meant accepting institutions as they are, not disrupting them.
  • Consider what black Harvard Business School alumni told the journalist Ellis Cose: A key to success is “never talk about race (or gender) if you can avoid it, other than to declare that race (or gender) does not matter.”
  • As the failure of the black political leadership in Baltimore to protect black lives and the limited ability of black police chiefs to curb brutality in their own departments demonstrate, people of color can inherit or perpetuate structures of inequality
  • Diversity and inclusion policies, therefore, should grow out of truth and reconciliation practices as well as strategic hiring plans.
  • Intentional transformation, even reparations, one government agency, one company, one college at a time moves us past the denial and the empty promises
  • Georgetown University’s decision to make reparations for its past is a powerful expression of creative dissent. Last year, after its president met with descendants of the enslaved African-Americans owned by the university he declared, “We cannot do our best work if we refuse to take ownership of such a critical part of our history.” Georgetown will provide preferential admissions to descendants, akin to legacy status for the children of alumni.
  • We should judge transformation by how our institutions behave on behalf of individuals rather than the other way around.
  • Mr. Obama himself seems ready to move on from the era of assimilation
  • he acknowledged, for the first time, the very real threat of racism to our democracy and the contingent nature of racial progress.
  • In a revision to the American creed, he added, equality may be self-evident but it has “never been self-executing.”
  • he listed specific areas where systemic racism needed to be uprooted, which he hadn’t done in his State of the Union addresses or inaugural speeches: “If we’re going to be serious about race going forward, we need to uphold laws against discrimination — in hiring, and in housing, and in education and in the criminal justice system.”
  • The future is no longer about “firsts.” It is instead about the content of the character of the institutions our new leaders will help us rebuild.
redavistinnell

Why I Cannot Fall in Line Behind Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Why I Cannot Fall in Line Behind Trump
  • Republicans who disagree with my stance make the following argument: Mr. Trump, while flawed, is preferable to Hillary Clinton. His cabinet appointments, they say, have been reassuring, and it’s true that several of them are. In addition, the nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court is certain to be more of an originalist than a Clinton appointment would be. On top of that, Republicans are in control of Congress, meaning they are likely to drive much of the agenda, particularly given Mr. Trump’s notable lack of interest in policy. Whatever misgivings anti-Trump conservatives might have had about him, he’ll undo much of the agenda of his liberal predecessor while Mrs. Clinton would have built on it.
  • To understand why, it’s worth keeping in mind that my chief worries about Mr. Trump were never strictly ideological; they had to do with temperament and character.
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  • The more pressing concern many of us had about Mr. Trump is that he simply isn’t up to the job of being president.
  • Last weekend Mr. Trump gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he said his administration would quickly put out its own health proposal, which would cover everyone now insured and cost much less.
  • The extraordinary and unenviable task facing the White House staff is to contain Mr. Trump, to keep a dysfunctional president from producing a dysfunctional presidency.
  • Beyond that, Mr. Trump has continued to demonstrate impulsivity and narcissism, an affinity for conflict and vindictiveness. Which leads to my main worry about Mr. Trump: His chronic lack of restraint will not be confined to Twitter. His Twitter obsessions are a manifestation of a deeper disorder.
  • He thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage. He is a shock jock. This might be a tolerable (if culturally coarsening) trait in a reality television star; it is a dangerous one in a commander in chief.
  • For Mr. Trump, nothing is sacred. The truth is malleable, instrumental, subjective. It is all about him. It is always about him.
  • When President Trump is buffeted by events — when hard times hit, when crises arise, when other politicians and world leaders do not bend to his will — pernicious things will happen.
  • Rather than try to address the alienation and anger that exists in America, he will amplify them. He’ll create yet more conspiracy theories.
  • He will also go in search of enemies — the press, the opposition party, other nations, even Republican leaders — in order to create diversions that inflame his most loyal supporters.
  • In failing to distinguish between the good of the nation and his own vanity, the danger is that Mr. Trump will fail to see the limits of his authority and will try to use both the bully pulpit and the power of government — the I.R.S., the F.B.I., regulatory agencies and others — to settle personal scores. He’ll do what he needs to in order to get his way.
  • What this means is that Republican leaders in Congress need to be ready to call Mr. Trump on his abuses and excesses, now that he is actually in office.
  • They need to ask themselves a simple, searching question: “If Barack Obama did this very thing, what would I be saying and doing now?” — and then say and do it.
  • man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.
Javier E

Crackpot Party Crackup - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Long ago and far away, in the days when white men in power ties and women in funny hats gathered in air-conditioned caverns to hammer out the Republican Party platform, it was a predictable affair. The G.O.P. was for less taxes and less government, free trade and free people, a scolding of victims and grievance-mongers, and a vision of social norms circa 1952.
  • As time went on, they let the cranks and the racists in, the fact-deniers and the extreme gun nuts, the xenophobes and the nature-haters, because the big tent could take in all that extra gas without overheating. They would tolerate those people, who you picture looking like that dude who sucker-punched a protester at a Trump rally, because they needed them.
  • imagine the Republican Party gathering for its convention in Cleveland and hammering out a vanity platform in Donald Trump’s image. It’s all walls and no bridges. Free trade is gone. Taxes? Who knows. There will be a call for more government, through a bloated military, and untouched benefits for seniors who must be pandered to. Most significantly, it’s a party of grudges and grievances, of anger and fear by that formerly detested class — victims.
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  • It’ll be a personality cult, without a hint of optimism, and certainly no overarching governing philosophy
  • In temperament and judgment, this is now Trump’s party. And take him at his word: His supporters will riot, as he predicted this week, if he doesn’t get his way.
  • There is no getting around how much Trump’s followers now echo his darkest sentiments. In Tuesday’s exit polls, huge majorities of Trump supporters backed his call to ban Muslims from entering the country, and for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants.
  • This month, members of the Republican national security community issued a strongly worded missive against Trump. They said his trade policies would be a “recipe for economic disaster,” that his embrace of torture was “inexcusable,” that his anti-Muslim campaign would badly damage American interests abroad, and on and on and on.
  • Where were these people six months ago? Laughing at the orange-haired clown with the rest us. But if this who’s who of Republican foreign policy cardinals is serious about their words, they have no choice but to leave the party this summer. Either that or accept the man who said he got foreign policy advice “speaking with myself.” For him, a glance in the mirror is enough. “I have a very good brain,” Trump said.
Javier E

Fables of Wealth - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.
  • Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By “pride” Mandeville meant vanity; by “luxury” he meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side, as we’d say, was fraud: “All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.”
  • These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.
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  • There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.
  • To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones.
  • Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.
  • Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we’re going to tax, and how much; what we’re going to spend, and on whom. But while “job creators” may be a new term, the adulation it expresses — and the contempt that it so clearly signals — are not. “Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good.
  • Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn’t think it did so on its own. Smith’s “hand” was “invisible” — the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville’s involved “the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician” — in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, “Vice is beneficial found, / When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.”
Javier E

The Cruel Paradox of Self-Publishing - Peter Osnos - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • By adding Author Solutions, with revenues last year said to be about $100 million, to such pedigreed Penguin names as Viking, Penguin Classics, Putnam, and Dutton, the concept of self-publishing has moved away from what was always known as "vanity publishing." While these authors are still mainly paying to see their works turned into finished print or e-books, they are no longer consigned just to the margins of the marketplace.
  • "Most self-published books sell fewer than 100 or 150 copies, many authors and self-publishing company executives say."
  • 211,000 self-published titles were released in 2011 in print or e-books, an increase of almost 60 percent over 2010. Presumably, that number will grow substantially again by the end of 2012.
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  • Carla King, writing for PBS Media Shift, cited the case of Brittany Geragotelis, who started sharing her work as a free serial e-book on the WattPad community for young adults and "attracted 13 million readers" before offering the book as a print-on-demand paperback through Amazon's CreateSpace. Eventually, she signed with Simon & Schuster to re-launch the book Life's a Witch, along with a sequel and prequel in three e-book installments.
  • He cited a University of Illinois expert who estimates that one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake (not just for books). So be warned that not all positive reviews are legitimate.
Javier E

'We Are the 99 Percent' Joins the Cultural and Political Lexicon - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • protesters have succeeded in implanting “We are the 99 percent,” referring to the vast majority of Americans (and its implied opposite, “You are the one percent,” the tiny proportion who, some estimates say, control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth), into the cultural and political lexicon.
  • Easily grasped in its simplicity and Twitter-friendly in its brevity, the slogan has practically dared listeners to pick a side.
  • Perhaps most important for the movement, there was a sevenfold increase in Google searches for the term “99 percent” between Sept
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  • ember and October and a spike in news stories about income inequality throughout the fall, heaping attention on the issues raised by activists.
  • The idea behind the 99 percent catchphrase has its roots in a decade’s worth of reporting about the income gap between the richest Americans and the rest, and more directly in May in a Vanity Fair column by the liberal economist Joseph E. Stiglitz titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” The slogan that resulted in September identified both a target, the “one percent,” and a theoretical constituency, everyone else.
  • Rhetorically, “it was really clever,” said David S. Meyer, a University of California, Irvine professor who studies social movements. “Deciding whom to blame is a key task of all politics,”
  • the catchphrase is a useful one in that it gives continuity and coherence to a movement that is losing some of its camps in major cities across the country.
Javier E

Restoring Henry by Michael O'Donnell | The Washington Monthly - 0 views

  • The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed
  • The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.
  • [A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?
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  • Tellingly, at several points in the narrative Ferguson strays from his thesis and defends Kissinger on more utilitarian grounds: the Cold War was real, its outcome was uncertain, and the United States needed every ugly advantage it could find on the geostrategic battlefield. The crimes of communist regimes vastly dwarfed Kissinger’s in scope and scale, Ferguson writes
  • Ferguson is now on the hook for his next volume to weigh the strategic implications of Kissinger’s most barbaric foreign policies once he assumed power
  • Ferguson’s problem is not a conflict of interest: it is his ideological affinity with his subject, and his determination because of that affinity to present his man favorably
  • This begins with Ferguson’s use of language, which repeatedly seeks to bring the reader onto Kissinger’s side
  • Ferguson spends much of the book attempting to rehabilitate Kissinger’s character. He makes an unpersuasive attempt to convince readers that Kissinger was not the relentless ladder climber we think we know.
  • The book also largely sidesteps the topic of Kissinger’s famous vanity, thin skin, and penchant for insincere flattery
  • Kissinger provided information and analysis to Nixon’s aide Richard Allen in breathless telephone calls, which he insisted be kept secret. Nixon’s campaign subsequently passed word to the South Vietnamese government that it could obtain better peace terms under a Nixon administration. South Vietnam pulled out of the talks just days before the U.S. election, the Democratic Party was humiliated, Nixon won the presidency—and then he immediately appointed Kissinger, a man he had met only once, his national security advisor.
  • Johnson referred to the maneuver—spiking a peace deal in order to win an election, thereby extending the Vietnam War—as treason
  • Yet Ferguson again is not convinced. He questions Allen’s reliability as a witness and contends that Nixon’s memoir does not prove that Kissinger was his insider. (Decide for yourself. Here is Nixon: “During the last days of the campaign, when Kissinger was providing us with information about the bombing halt, I became more aware of both his knowledge and his influence.”)
  • Ferguson also makes the legalistic argument that Kissinger’s intervention was not determinative, for Nixon had other informers, and North Vietnam “would surely” have found a pretext to abandon the peace talks had South Vietnam not walked out first. If we use Johnson’s terms, I suppose that reduces the charge to attempted treason.
  • Kissinger’s Shadow. Grandin, a historian at New York University, contends that Kissinger has left us with war as an instrument of policy, less as a last resort than as a kind of peacock’s strut. “Kissinger taught that there was no such thing as stasis in international affairs,” Grandin writes. “[G]reat states are always either gaining or losing influence, which means that the balance of power has to be constantly tested through gesture and deed.” (He quotes Kissinger as asking a fellow cabinet member, “Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?”)
  • The abiding concern driving Kissinger’s foreign policy was therefore maintaining credibility: action to avoid the appearance of inability to act.
  • Secrecy is very much a part of Kissinger’s legacy. His systematic efforts to keep the war in Cambodia from becoming public—false records, wiretaps, blatant lies told to Congress—are much more disturbing than the fourth-rate jiggery-pokery of Watergate
  • Ferguson downplays this too, projecting his disagreement by writing disdainfully that “we are told” Kissinger loved secrecy
Javier E

Hirsi Ali, Berman, and Ramadan on Islam : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • During the Vietnam War, Hannah Arendt noted that members of the Democratic Administration had frequent recourse to phrases like “monolithic communism,” and “second Munich,” and deduced from this an inability “to confront reality on its own terms because they had always some parallels in mind that ‘helped’ them to understand those terms.”
  • the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once pointed out that, however much intellectuals yearn to be both “prophets and heralds of reason,” those roles cannot be reconciled. “The common human qualities of vanity and greed for power” are particularly dangerous among intellectuals, he observed, and their longing to identify with political causes often results in “an almost unbelievable loss of critical reasoning.”
  • This was never a risk for Kolakowski’s model thinker-activist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a “peace-loving incendiary,” who was at once engaged in the major conflicts of his day and “withdrawn and careful, unwilling to go to extremes”—the great promoter of religious reform who declined to join the Reformation.
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  • in these volatile times, intellectuals would do well to reacquaint themselves with what Kolakowski described as the “history of many deceitful hopes”—the crimes of ideological passion in which even liberals have been complicit. ♦
jlessner

I Am Not Charlie Hebdo - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds.
  • Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.
  • Moreover, provocateurs and ridiculers expose the stupidity of the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are people who take everything literally. They are incapable of multiple viewpoints.
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  • Yet, at the same time, most of us know that provocateurs and other outlandish figures serve useful public roles. Satirists and ridiculers expose our weakness and vanity when we are feeling proud. They puncture the self-puffery of the successful. They level social inequality by bringing the mighty low. When they are effective they help us address our foibles communally, since laughter is one of the ultimate bonding experiences.
  • If you try to pull off this delicate balance with law, speech codes and banned speakers, you’ll end up with crude censorship and a strangled conversation.
  • Healthy societies, in other words, don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people.
  • Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semirespect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct.
  • The massacre at Charlie Hebdo should be an occasion to end speech codes. And it should remind us to be legally tolerant toward offensive voices, even as we are socially discriminating.
Javier E

Debate Over Cecil Rhodes Statue at Oxford Gains Steam - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “Like many historical figures, Rhodes did both good and bad, and things look different when today’s standards are applied,” Mr. Gerson said. “Our values today are opposed to the views of the world held by Rhodes, and much of his generation, but his bequest is forever deserving of respect.”
  • “Its wording is a political tribute, and the college believes its continuing display on Oriel property is inconsistent with our principles,” it said.The statement added that the statue raised more complex issues and that “in the absence of any context or explanation, it can be seen as an uncritical celebration of a controversial figure, and the colonialism and the oppression of black communities he represents.”
  • “Rhodes was not a campaigner against racism, but many of the scholars who are his legacy have been,” Mr. Abbott wrote.“Oxford would damage its standing as a great university if it were to substitute moral vanity for fair-minded inquiry,” he said, adding that “the university and its students should prefer improving today’s orthodoxies to imposing them on our forebears.”
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  • Mr. Abbott’s intervention, which came in an email to The Independent, argued that it was possible to lament that Rhodes “failed to oppose unjust features of his society while still celebrating the genius” that led to the Rhodes scholarships.
  • Some British politicians have sought to depict the campaign as a demonstration of political correctness and an effort to erase history, a notion that supporters reject.
  • R. W. Johnson, an author who is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College at Oxford, compared the campaign to remove the monument to what Al Qaeda and the Islamic State “are doing in places like Mali when destroying statues.
  • “The significance of taking down the statue is simple,” he added. “Cecil Rhodes is the Hitler of southern Africa. Would anyone countenance a statue to Hitler?”
  • Brian Kwoba, a doctoral student, told The Independent newspaper that Rhodes was responsible for “stealing land, massacring tens of thousands of black Africans, imposing a regime of unspeakable labor exploitation in the diamond mines and devising pro-apartheid policies.”
katyshannon

Jim Webb drops out of Democratic presidential primary - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Jim Webb ended his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination at a press conference Tuesday, telling reporters he will consider an independent bid.
  • Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, Webb argued the Democratic Party has moved away from "millions of dedicated, hard-working Americans.""For this reason, I am withdrawing from any consideration of being the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency," he said.
  • "The very nature of our democracy is under siege due to the power structure and the money that finances both political parities," Webb said, adding later that it is "time for a new Declaration of Independence -- not from an outside power but from the paralysis of a federal system that no longer serves the interests of the vast majority of the American people."Webb, who said he couldn't see himself endorsing any other candidate, said he is considering an independent run and will spend the "next couple of weeks talking to people, people I have not felt comfortable talking with as a Democratic Party candidate."
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  • Webb's campaign never really got off the ground and was seen by even some close Webb aides as more of a vanity play than an actual presidential bid. In total, Webb spent four days campaigning in New Hampshire and 20 days in Iowa, far fewer than the senator's challengers.
  • Webb has long expressed outright frustration with the Democratic Party -- and did so again in announcing the end of his bid -- questioning its strategy and the support they were providing him. During the first Democratic debate earlier this month, Webb spent considerable time complaining about the amount of time he was given to speak.
  • "Some people say I am a Republican who became a Democrat, but that I often sound like a Republican in a room full of Democrats or a Democrat in a room full of Republicans," Webb said. "Actually, I take that as a compliment."
  • Webb, then a Republican, notably served as secretary of the Navy under then-President Ronald Reagan after a decorated military career.
  •  
    Jim Webb drops out the Democratic presidential primary, may still run as an independent.
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