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Javier E

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today | Samantha Hill | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...masha-gessen-israel-gaza-essay

Arendt prize anti-Semitism irony law

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation
  • The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.
  • The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:
  • “The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”
  • Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception
  • his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo
  • By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.
  • For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures
  • In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.
  • he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew
  • She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision
  • in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.
  • Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975
  • while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.
  • Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state
  • It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.
  • Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich
  • She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another
  • All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it
  • right now Germany’s resolution forbids it
  • This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth
  • The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”
  • What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning
  • Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil
  • Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.
Javier E

Opinion | 'Civil War' and Its Terrifying Premonition of American Collapse - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...civil-war-movie.html

civil war movie culture trump

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • In one 2022 poll, 43 percent of Americans said they thought a civil war within the next decade was at least somewhat likely. I wouldn’t go that far, but I won’t be surprised if political violence spikes after the upcoming election and eventually spirals out of control.
  • now that I’ve seen “Civil War,” which is neither glib nor cynical, Garland’s decision to keep the film’s politics a little ambiguous seems like a source of its power. The emphasis here should be on “a little” because, contrary to some of what I’d read, its values aren’t inscrutable, just lightly worn
  • Part of what makes it so searing, though, is that aside from its unlikely California-Texas alliance, its story doesn’t require too much explanation to make sense.
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  • it’s not a stretch to interpret the film as a premonition of how a seething, entropic country could collapse under the weight of Donald Trump’s return.
  • In America, you need less signposting on the route from our uneasy present to an imagined implosion. The movie’s refugee camps don’t look all that different from the tent encampments in many American cities. The paramilitary guy, in his fatigues and goofy red sunglasses, could easily be a Boogaloo Boi or an Oath Keeper. The culminating battle in the capital is a more intense version of scenes we witnessed on Jan. 6.
  • Early in the movie Lee says, “Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo, I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this.” “Civil War” works as a similar sort of warning. It’s close enough to where America is right now that we don’t need Garland to fill in all the blanks.
Javier E

Deborah Feldman, the Author of 'Unorthodox,' Touches a Nerve in Germany - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eldman-unorthodox-germany.html

author germany Berlin cultural diversity capital controversy holocaust

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • What I really think has happened here is that memory culture has produced two warring phenomena.
  • It produced a society that is paralyzed by guilt and discomfort. Germany doesn’t have emotional space and energy for any other historical responsibility other than the reality that it perpetrated the Holocaust.
  • at the same time, official memory culture created an unchecked arena for politicians to abuse that history. These politicians don’t reflect the views of society, but they don’t feel the need to, because they’ve created a culture in which society doesn’t have a say in this issue. And it is so sad that the Jewish people have such diverse cultural, ethnic and religious identities, but in Germany they have to subsume it into the identity of the Holocaust victim.
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  • Documenta was a very big moment for artists on this issue. Everyone started getting very afraid. What we’ve been experiencing is a gap between the cultural establishment and the political structures that fund the culture scene.
  • I have a lot of Palestinian friends. A lot of Israeli friends. A lot of
  • friends with an immigrant background. My whole community was just paralyzed by fear and hopelessness and this feeling of being humiliated, denigrated, dehumanized.
  • I have lost my faith in German media. I never had faith in German politics, but now I really have no hope for German politics. Honestly, I think what I still feel connected to are the people who tell me privately: “I agree with you, but if I say it, I lose my job.”
Javier E

Opinion | America's Irrational Macreconomic Freak Out - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ntiment-inflation-anxiety.html

bias perception economic cognitive bias psychology brain science

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel.
  • It follows that the typical worker can now afford two percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a faster rate of improvement than the average rate of real wage growth over the past few decades.
  • many folks feel that they’re falling behind, even when a careful analysis of the numbers suggests they’re not.
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  • That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways.
  • In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains due to inflation and externalize the losses. These different processes yield different emotional responses.
  • Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.
  • younger folks — anyone under 60 — had never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.
  • Even though wages tend to rise hand-in-hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage rises we get have nothing to do with price rises that cause them.
  • But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment
  • Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.
  • The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage rises that actually restore it.
  • in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.
  • While older Americans understood that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.
  • Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.
  • More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “silent depression,” and those who want to make American great again are certain it was once so much better.
  • in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history
  • And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.
  • The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.
  • Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.
Javier E

Opinion | The Florida Fraudster and the Russian 'Killer' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...navalny-putin-trump.html

putin apologist propaganda politics trump

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • When a CNN reporter asked if Trump had a response to the heroic Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed her to a Truth Social post that wasn’t about Navalny or Putin. It was about how awful America was.
  • Before Navalny’s death, Tucker Carlson — who scorned Ukraine’s desperate fight for its independence — cavorted in the Kremlin. His interview with Putin was so indulgent that even Putin complained of a “lack of sharp questions.”
  • At an Axios conference in Miami, Jared Kushner — who was festooned with $2 billion in Saudi investments after he left the White House — called Mohammed bin Salman a “visionary leader.” Asked about the crown prince’s complicity in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner replied with exasperation, “Are we really still doing this?”
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  • “America is no longer respected,” Trump posted, “because we have an incompetent president who is weak and doesn’t understand what the World is thinking.”
  • In an interview with an Egyptian journalist, Carlson defended his decision not to ask Putin about freedom of speech or assassinations of his opponents.
  • “Every leader kills people,” Carlson said blithely, adding, “Leadership requires killing people, sorry.”
Javier E

They Promoted Body Positivity. Then They Lost Weight. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-influencers-weight-loss.html

body weight fat influencer

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • On a recent episode of the Burnt Toast podcast covering the rise of fat influencers losing weight, Virginia Sole-Smith, a journalist who writes about diet culture and who has contributed to The Times, said that influencers who once promoted fat acceptance but now claim they feel healthier when they are thinner are “throwing everyone else under the bus.”
  • “You used the hashtags in order to grow your following in order to post your affiliate links, get your sponsor deals, all of that,” Ms. Sole-Smith said. “So now what you’re basically telling us is you co-opted all that rhetoric and you don’t believe it at all, and that is pretty gross.”
  • Her co-host Corinne Fay said she thought it was better for influencers to be upfront if they were using weight-loss drugs instead of vaguely claiming to be “pursuing health.”“They don’t want to call it a diet, so it’s called a health and fitness journey,” Ms. Sole-Smith said. “That’s pretty exasperating.”
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  • Ms. Davis acknowledged that with her weight loss came affirmation — more party invitations, more attention from men. “I so badly want to be like, ‘What you look like doesn’t matter,’” she said. “But it sure does change how people treat you.”
  • When she relapsed, Ms. Davis convinced herself she was just trying to eat healthier and be more active. Soon though, she said, she was subsisting on rice cakes and Red Bull
  • iven that she is still working on her own issues — and given that she’s no longer plus size — she doesn’t feel it’s her place to advocate body positivity online.“There was a time when I was in a body where I was experiencing fatphobia,” she said. “Now that I’m not in that body currently, I don’t think my voice is needed.”
  • When Ms. James first noticed that Ms. Davis had lost weight, she unfollowed her. “I just didn’t think that was good for me,” she said. But then she noticed her feeds were full of people posting their exercise and diet routines. Ms. Davis was just one of many women who were no longer proudly plus size. Ms. James re-followed her. And recently, she said, she started working out and shedding pounds herself.“I guess weight is just as much of a trend as anything else,” Ms. James said.
Javier E

Even Rats Are Taking Selfies Now (and Enjoying It) - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...photography-rats-selfies.html

rats photos selfie

shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • Mr. Lignier built his own version of a Skinner box — a tall, transparent tower with an attached camera — and released two pet-store rats inside. Whenever the rats pressed the button inside the box, they got a small dose of sugar and the camera snapped their photo. The resulting images were immediately displayed on a screen, where the rats could see them. (“But honestly I don’t think they understood it,” Mr. Lignier said.)
  • The rodents quickly became enthusiastic button pushers. “They are very clever,”
  • after this training phase, the rewards became more unpredictable. Although the rats were still photographed every time they hit the button, the sweet treats came only once in a while, by design. These kinds of intermittent rewards can be especially powerful, scientists have found, keeping animals glued to their experimental slot machines as they await their next jackpot.
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  • Indeed, in the face of these unpredictable rewards, Augustin and Arthur — the rats — persisted. Sometimes, they ignored the sugar even when it did arrive, Mr. Lignier said, and just kept pressing the button anyway.
  • To Mr. Lignier, the parallel is obvious. “Digital and social media companies use the same concept to keep the attention of the viewer as long as possible,”
  • Indeed, social media has been described as “a Skinner Box for the modern human,” doling out periodic, unpredictable rewards — a like, a follow, a promising romantic match — that keep us glued to our phones.
  • Maybe we would rather sit around and push whatever levers are in front of us — even those that might make us feel bad — than sit with ourselves in quiet contemplation.
Javier E

Opinion | What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Power and Language Today - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ell-language-antisemitism.html

orwell language corruption debasement culture history

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • “The word Fascism,” he writes, “has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
  • He adds other exhausted words, including democracy, freedom and patriotic — convenient terms for establishing righteousness, easily melting into self-righteousness.
  • The writer is George Orwell, in his celebrated 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell contended that language had become corrupt and debased in his time, but the survival of his examples into the present contradicts him, suggesting that not only the problem but the very examples may be timeless.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • I showed that passage to an intelligent, well-educated person much younger than I am. He understood Orwell’s intention, but he confessed that he found the parody, with its colorless polysyllables, easier to understand — he might have said “more accessible” — than the plain words of the original. It felt better to him than the original.
  • Dilution of meaning is familiar in a way that can make us feel comfortable, or even worse, comfortably righteous
  • The reliably available terms of disapproval and approval, genocide and patriotism, antisemitism and democracy, convey large scale and importance, but sometimes while avoiding the heavy cost of paying actual attention.
  • The more important the word, the more its meaning may be a matter of degree, from not much to quite a lot. The attainment of meaning requires work. The more important the meaning, the harder the work.
Javier E

Some Silicon Valley VCs Are Becoming More Conservative - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...valley-conservative-trump.html

silicon valley politics support GOP Trump VC

shared by Javier E on 24 May 24 - No Cached
  • The circle of Republican donors in the nation’s tech capital has long been limited to a few tech executives such as Scott McNealy, a founder of Sun Microsystems; Meg Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay; Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Larry Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital.
  • But mostly, the tech industry cultivated close ties with Democrats. Al Gore, the former Democratic vice president, joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2007. Over the next decade, tech companies including Airbnb, Google, Uber and Apple eagerly hired former members of the Obama administration.
  • During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who supports Mr. Biden.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.
  • The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.
  • Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.
  • Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats,
  • Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.
  • “If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”
  • Some tech investors are also fuming over how Mr. Biden has handled foreign affairs and other issues.
  • Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.
  • Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.
  • “Tech, venture capital and Silicon Valley are looking at the current state of affairs and saying, ‘I’m not happy with either of those options,’” he said. “‘I can no longer count on Democrats to support tech issues, and I can no longer count on Republicans to support business issues.’”
  • Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post last year that the firm would back any politician who supported “an optimistic technology-enabled future” and oppose any who did not. Andreessen Horowitz has donated $22 million to Fairshake, a political action group focused on supporting crypto-friendly lawmakers.
  • Venture investors are also networking with lawmakers in Washington at events like the Hill & Valley conference in March, organized by Jacob Helberg, an adviser to Palantir, a tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel. At that event, tech executives and investors lobbied lawmakers against A.I. regulations and asked for more government spending to support the technology’s development in the United States.
  • This month, Mr. Helberg, who is married to Mr. Rabois, donated $1 million to the Trump campaign
Javier E

Opinion | Jan. 6, America's Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...emory-memorial-forgetting.html

oblivion forgetting public accountability responsibility memory

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • This is not the first time our nation has survived a profound internal rupture, but it may be the first time in which the political ringleaders of the revolt may very well escape much accountability while hundreds of their followers serve jail time.
  • In previous times of national crisis, the same spirit of mercy that Mr. Biden conjured generally applied to lower-level offenders, while those who had committed the worst crimes were the first to be arrested and tried for their treasonous acts.
  • As a legal mechanism, oblivion promised the return to a past that still had a future, in which the battles of old would not predetermine those still to come. It did not always achieve its lofty aspirations, nor was it appropriate for all conflicts. But the ideals it grasped for had an enduring appeal.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.
  • The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.
  • the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault
  • Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.
  • For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm
  • Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office
  • I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.
  • Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don
  • consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.
  • over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.
  • The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.
  • The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”
  • In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War
  • To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism
  • the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.
  • Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.
  • This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.
  • Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us
  • we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance
  • Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need
  • our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.
  • Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.
  • The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.
  • Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Can't College Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some Theories - and Fixes. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aduates-jobs-unemployment.html

inflation thinking assumptions fallacy history economics culture politics US policy

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • simply tossing your résumé and cover letter into a company’s job portal has a low probability of success, especially now. It’s so easy to submit applications that companies are being bombarded with thousands of them. Human beings can’t possibly review all of them, so they’re reviewed by computers, which simply search for keywords. They don’t understand in any deep way either the applicant’s qualities or the employer’s needs.
  • “The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won’t use keywords” the way the evaluation algorithm wants,
  • Personal contact is crucial, he said. Rather than spraying applications far and wide, he recommends focusing on a handful of companies, researching them in depth and contacting a wide range of people connected with them, even their suppliers and customers.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Du Bois’s quote, “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States,” serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of education, understanding and open discourse in addressing societal challenges.
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