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The Oldest Man posted:Have you read The Homecoming Saga? Because I have. The entire thing. I had completely forgotten about this trash. I read the first book of this in my early teens and was creeped out enough by the sex stuff in it that it completely turned me off of Card’s writing after loving the Ender books. Let’s check in with Wikipedia’s description of a character: Wikipedia posted:Hosni gently caress Card for lots of things, but also this. Still creepy twenty-odd years later. Ruzaii fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 15, 2020 22:57
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Ruzaii posted:I had completely forgotten about this trash. I read the first book of this in my early teens and was creeped out enough by the sex stuff in it that it completely turned me off of Card’s writing after loving the Ender books. Something of the sort was an actual practice in several real-world cultures (e.g., pre-contact Hawaii), for what it's worth. But in the context of some of Card's other writing, there do seem to be some disturbing patterns here, yeah. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 01:33
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I forgot I was on the hook for this, it was very nice. Then I was justly probed, very relaxing. Welcome back to Dinesh D'Souza's The Roots of Obama's Rage. We're roughly halfway through the book by chapter count and each chapter is roughly twenty pages long for those of you keeping track. Chapter 5: African in America  quote:This chapter traces the process by which Barack Obama became black. Buckle up, this is the first sentence of the chapter and I'm assuming it's going to be worse than the last chapter. quote:How, then, did Obama become black? Surely not by appearance; the man is lighter skinned than I am, and I'm not black. quote:Certainly Obama recognized from early adolescence on that he needed to be black. quote:"I want you to come visit us down in Alabama where we are seeking the same kind of freedom Ghana is celebrating...There is no basic difference between colonialism and racial segregation." quote:In effect, Obama is saying: what matters most to me is this big struggle between the rulers and the subject peoples across the globe, but I can understand and identify with the black struggle in America as a local skirmish within that larger conflict. Obama knew a Communist who was also a black dude, Frank Marshall Davis. That's it, guy was a friend of his grandfather's and Obama liked him. This is spun into a narrative where Obama gets another surrogate father who is also opposed to white supremacy and imperialism. You may notice I'm not quoting anything, well neither did D'Souza. The quote we do get quote:Obama makes no reference to any of Davis's writings and merely calls im "a poet named Frank." Obama goes to college and D'Souza calls a paper Obama wrote as an undergrad about Heart of Darkness jejune. I had to look that word up to make sure it meant what I thought it did "dry or uninteresting" which ngl feels like the pot calling the kettle black. Obama transfers to Columbia and D'Souza pays it little attention beyond establishing that Edward Said taught Obama which means that he must've had a lasting influence on Obama despite "nowhere does Said's name appear in any of Obama's writings or speeches." We get a couple paragraphs on the Critical Legal Studies movement which can be summed up as: quote:Law pretends to be fair and neutral, but it is really a sham; it is politics by other means; legal structures are merely a camouflage for keeping entrenched interests in power. We're five chapters deep and no effort has been made to establish that Obama is actually full of rage or that anti-colonialism is bad. I'm beginning to think neither of those things are ever going to be established.
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Oct 16, 2020 03:56
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More Ben Shapiro, yay! We have now cleared part 5: SOAPBOX: Government. The columns come and go, blending together. Their edges become fuzzy as each passing opinion piece covers less and less new ground. It's like a pile of dominoes, where each piece is composed of parts that can be found in two other pieces. Unfortunately these dominoes are not the fun ones. They are cursed. Every once in a while, he still manages to wake me up from my trance with some... let's say eyebrow raising assumptions: Ben posted:Our politicians aren’t so much ambitious for power as they are afraid of accountability. Or some quality cherry picking: Ben posted:in 1926, religious congregations spent more than $150 million on projects other than church maintenance and upkeep, with state governments spending just $23 million and local governments spending $37 million, Ben's penchant for treating the story of the week like the opener part of a Simpson's episode that transitions into whatever point he's trying to make can sometimes feel forced to the point of ridicule: Ben posted:The checks and balances that were supposed to contain Duntsch failed utterly. His medical school licensed him but didn't require the preparation necessary to instill competence. Hospitals suspended him but didn't report him. The medical board could do nothing without forms filed against him. Patients were left without recourse. Using a case where government-driven regulations were insufficient to prevent tragedy is not a good opener for extolling the virtues of government gridlock, Ben. Finally, Ben tastefully closes his government soapbox by proving that the only reason the Democrats kicked Franken out was to make Trump look bad. That's just a fact now. Deal with it. Aramis fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Oct 19, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 07:13
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Somfin posted:Nixonland starts off with an extended intro summarising the core ideas that the book is going to touch on, with the notable moment toward the end saying that the "protagonist" is not Nixon, nor LBJ, nor any of the great named figures, but the nameless voter who, for obvious societal reasons and along with 61.1% of their peers, voted Democrat in 1964, then, for the exact same reasons, switched to voting Republican in 1972. Yes, Nixon wins in 1968- but the crushing win, 60.1%, will be in 1972, which is where the book's timeline ends. I've read this book and you can bypass the notes, but even if you don't read the whole thing for this, pick it back up at some point anyway. It's a great book. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 18:58
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Chapter Six: Becoming Barackquote:...Obama's recognition that white America had been shamed by its history of slavery and racism, and this shaming had resulted in an accumulation of white guilt. This white guilt has in our day become a fund of political and financial capital for blacks to draw on. As far as black nationalism D'Souza thinks Obama didn't embrace it because it doesn't sell. D'Souza runs down Jackson, calls him a blackmailer and "a godfather of a kind of black mafia". The citation he uses for this is the book Shakedown from Regnery. I'm not going to review another book to finish this one but I will say in passing that afaict from a quick search it's garbage. C-SPAN author interview if you've got that kind of sickness Saul Alinsky comes into the picture, D'Souza makes sure his readers know that Rules for Radicals is dedicated to the very first radical, Lucifer aka SATAN.  quote:Alinsky could show him how, working on behalf of the wretched of the earth, he might bring down the Haves and seize power. Do you remember Jeremiah Wright? He was Obama's Reverend for twenty years. D'Souza argues that he was Obama's third surrogate father. Wright was an anti-colonialist, amongst other things. D'Souza quotes a sermon Wright gave after 9/11 about chickens coming home to roost and again fails to condemn the sermon or anti-colonialism as a whole. I suspect his intended audience would get angry at the idea that America deserved 9/11 even in 2010 9 years into the Forever War. Obama goes to Kenya, and it looks like we're going to spend the rest of the chapter there. I'm going to sum it up very simply as "the most important journey of his life...the culmination of his quest for self-identity." Kenya then, is where Obama finally achieves his ultimate form as an anti-colonialist. Hahaha gently caress you there's fourteen pages of Kenya and if I could I would make you read all of them. They are as close to D'Souza gets to good writing so far and most of it is just direct quotes from Obama's biography. What isn't from Obama is straight up colonial British apologism: quote:Historians wonder why the British were so brutal in suppressing the Mau Mau. The reason is obvious: by the end of the nineteenth century, the small island of England controlled a worldwide empire. *multiple pages of justification for the British slaughtering natives and putting natives in concentration camps and just generally being British* While the literature on the Mau Mau crackdown makes for gruesome reading, in a sense it is not unique, because colonial powers have always used their power to crush such revolts. Relevant Tangent fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 03:08
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On this next episode of the Ben Shapiro show: The Economy: Capitalism & Freedom. I was worried for a second. The first column is actually... reasonable! A simple: "Individual Politicians aren't responsible for the economy". Even I can't argue against this one. The second one is just him jumping on a since-then disproved study about the bad effects of minimum wage increases. This is why you wait for the peer reviews Ben. You don't want to retroactively look like an idiot. Still, pretty run-of-the-mill stuff at this point in the book. But then Ben delivers. In Google's Leftist Goggles Leave Googlers Agog  , Ben throws his hat in defense of James Damore. I don't know why he doesn't bother naming Damore in his column though, considering that his hero of the week was definitely in need of as much support as possible at the time.Now, I've read the Damore memo, and: quote:The employee penned a 10-page Jerry Maguire-style memo outlining Google's obsession with "diversity" Is really funny to me, because Damore is many things, but Jerry Maguire is certainly not one of them. Ben, but emphasis mine posted:This intrepid soul openly signaled his opposition to sexism but then pointed out that personality differences between men and women on average, as well as men's higher drive for status, could lead to wage gaps at the company. That is absolutely correct based on a tremendous amount of available social science data. In fact, it's also true that while women on average may slightly outperform men on IQ tests, more men are found at the extremes of the bell curve — there are more men on the upper and lower ends of the spectrum. That would lead to the hiring of more men at prestigious companies like Google based on merit, not based on sexism. He does bother namedropping his grifter buddies though. I guess James is just not high up the totem pole enough yet: quote:[...] disproportionately targeting comics like Steven Crowder and educators like Dennis Prager. In the very next column, Ben opens with quote:On Monday, two seemingly unrelated headlines made the news. The first: America's national debt had finally reached $20 trillion. The second: New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker had finally come out in favor of Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders' magical, mythical "Medicare-For-All" plan. I wonder how he's going to square THAT circle... He also accidentally inserted the template he uses in almost all of his columns: quote:In exposing their own radicalism, the Democrats have provided Republicans with an opportunity to seize the middle with conservatism. Finally, some choice hot-takes from Ben (paraphrased): "Nobody asked Bernie Sanders how he's planning to pay for medicare-for-all until now (august 2018)" "Americans statistically have a ton of material comforts, yet many aren't proud to be American. How ungrateful." "Healthcare being expensive in the US benefits the entire world" (he says that this is a good thing btw) Aramis fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Oct 18, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 04:30
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Accusing crowder of being a comic or prager of being an educator is possibly the most wild thing.
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Oct 17, 2020 13:00
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The wild thing about Shapiro is that he assumes everyone else has the same relationship to truth that he does and everyone is lying all the time in order to score points. Can you imagine just not understanding that people can believe things sincerely or care about truth? His childhood must have been the most hosed up thing, not that I pity him.
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Oct 17, 2020 14:04
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:The wild thing about Shapiro is that he assumes everyone else has the same relationship to truth that he does and everyone is lying all the time in order to score points. Can you imagine just not understanding that people can believe things sincerely or care about truth? His childhood must have been the most hosed up thing, not that I pity him. This is not quite right. Ben is a real honest-to-god libertarian. This is a, if not The, "truth" he believes sincerely and cares about. His seemingly rocky relationship with facts comes from a classic "The end justifies the means" perspective. If he can achieve his objective, then it doesn't matter if he's being truthful. He could be arguing his position in good faith, but in order to do that, he'd have to make his argument in a somewhat more subdued way; explain how some other external factors interact with whatever he's talking about that explains why his viewpoint doesn't seem to work in this particular case at first glance. But what does this accomplish, really? His argument might become more honest and correct, but it would be complicated, and lead to fewer people being convinced. It's just more effective to lie, and effectiveness is what really matters here, because he's not scoring points, he's recruiting. I'm in your head Ben! You've let me in, and your psyche is now laid bare. You can't escape! MWAHAHAHAHAHA. Aramis fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 17:28
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Chapter 7: Putting on the Maskquote:If our account is right, at this point in his life he was filled with hatred, but it was a calm hatred, an ideological hatred. quote:In Fanon's view, the hidden desire of the colonized is to replicate the crimes of the colonizer. "The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor." Is this also Obama's dream? I think it is... quote:Obama, of course, made the same intellectual compromise with Fanon, embracing his anti-colonial cause while rejecting his call to violence. There's a bunch of  about how Obama realized he needed to be black but not too black etc. etc. ad nausem, basically D'Souza explains code-switching to his audience without ever using the term. It's not wrong but it's all written to make the idea that Obama talks differently to a crowd at a church down in Georgia than he does to a crowd in California sound corrupt and suspicious rather than politically astute.7 of 9 briefly enters the picture via her idiot husband Jack Ryan getting embroiled in a sex scandal. quote:...Obama discovered he could count on a huge reservoir of repressed disgust for the Clintons. 
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Oct 18, 2020 03:31
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First off: Shout out to Relevant Tangent, slogging through D'souza. We're in this together. Media Runs Rampant Important note: I type these as I read the chapters, and only minimally edit them for format and flow so that you can experience this with me to a degree. Because of this, this chapter's review features a massive tone shift in the middle. If you are having a bad day, the tonal whiplash is not going to do you any favour, and you should probably just come back later. The chapter deals with how the media has been/is unfair to the right, and it starts with a bang. Ben has axes to grind in the first column: Republicans vs. The Media. The real problem, according to Ben, is not the media's leftist bias, it's spineless republicans enabling the media's abuse: Ben, friendly fire, Shapiro posted:For each Republican willing to label George Stephanopoulos a political hack, there's a camera-loving John McCain willing to grant Stephanopoulos the premise of neutrality for a bit of airtime. For every Republican willing to ask CNBC moderators about their history of leftist questioning, there's a John Kasich willing to praise the moderators as open-minded and fair. Ok... Hold the presses. This, this is the kind of stuff that makes wadding through this repetitive slog worth it. Seriously, if you have to read one single full Ben Shapiro column, make it The Smug Blind Left Is Trump's Best Friend. Or you can just go straight to the payoff right below. I encourage you to perform a small drumroll before revealing the spoiler. Ben, you don't say, Shapiro posted:
So far, we are two-for-two in this section. Can Ben keep this up? Seems like he still has fuel in the tank. Ben, no pity for the orange man, Shapiro posted:And the media melted down. They treated Trump horribly, of course — but they'd already treated Bush and Romney just as badly. (insert extremely appalled shots of Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper) Alright, how does Ben tackle the Russian Collusion stuff? Simple: Trump is intentionally behaving as a guilty person would because doubling-down is his only move. I mean, he's probably right, but if "my client just can't help himself from doing everything in his power to look as guilty as possible" is the best your lawyer can do... Ben, about to be disbarred, Shapiro posted:Here's the truth: Trump isn't a conspiratorial mastermind. He's a man irked by empty criticisms and dedicated to kicking his enemies in their most vulnerable areas. Sometimes that looks like he's reinforcing their theories. He isn't. After that came a small palate cleanser of a column about Warren's silly DNA test, which is such a softball in Ben's direction, I would probably have given up altogether on this review if there was anything noteworthy in there. The next column, however, is titled The Scientific Experts Who Hate Science... Do I need to say more? Actually I DO need to say more. I'm not linking to this column or pulling any quote from it because it's transphobic as all hell. gently caress You Ben Shapiro for penning this trash. The next column, I almost dismissed. The Republican Pouncing Problem is a lot of words to just say Ben, gently caress you again, Shapiro posted:whenever Democrats screw up. Republican gaffes are a story in and of themselves. Democratic gaffes aren't a story; Republican nastiness is. But then he just can't help himself: Ben, the overweight lion, Shaprio posted:I suppose this means I'm pouncing on the media, though. A steady diet is not pouncing, Ben. The last two columns of the chapter are not particularly interesting. Media frenzy and big tech bias. Well-trodden ground at this point, and no funny foot-in-mouth moment. All in all, this chapter was a roller coaster ride, with the highest high and the lowest low of the book so far. If it wasn't for that steaming turd smack-dab in the middle, I would have called it the most entertaining yet. Up next: New Wave Feminism. Oh boy. Aramis fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Oct 19, 2020 |
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Oct 19, 2020 04:42
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There's an episode of a Youtube show called "Best of the Worst" where the hosts watch a video cassette containing a series of music videos that becomes progressively more cultish in nature as time passes. It starts off with a catchy song about how dedicating yourself only to your job is bad for happiness (I think) and ends with full-blown "Bar codes are the mark of the devil, and a sign of the rapture. Go live in the woods!". It takes a while for the hosts to realize that they've been watching unhinged stuff. This is how I'm feeling as I delve into New Wave Feminism. Ben seems pretty confident that any weak-kneed onlooker will have stopped reading by now. The section is full of rape victim-blaming, trans-cancellation, anti-choice rhetoric and generalized misogyny. It's vile stuff, but he still manages to get through without using  as a noun, so he's got that going for him, I guess. To top it all, he has the gall to include a column called Stop feministplaining Sex to Men in which he can't even bring himself to be honest about the definition of mansplaining:"Ben, the gentleman, Shapiro" posted:if a man believes a woman doesn't understand directions and slowly repeats those directions to a woman, he's mansplaining and, therefore, guilty of cruelty and stupidity. In all this mess, Ben shockingly still managed to exceed my expectations. You'd think Does Yes Ever Mean Yes?  , Would be your run-of-the-mill rant about consent. But it's so much more worse than that. Not content with ranting about how acquiring consent is hard for boys nowadays, Ben blames feminism for allowing men to hope for sex:Ben, modern Don Juan, Shapiro posted:Yes, men had hopes of sex — all men do, virtually all of the time. But men had no expectation that such hopes would be achieved absent serious commitment. Thanks to our consent-only society, however, in which sexual activity is a throwaway and any notion of cherishing it is scoffed at as patriarchal, men have developed expectations that too many women feel they must meet I also want to highlight No, abortion isn’t a constitutional right Where Ben makes a case that: Ben, that's not what a metric is, Shapiro posted:The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) is a legal monstrosity by every available metric Said case is made through utter gibberish: Ben, still disbarred since last chapter, Shapiro posted:How? The court relied on the self-contradictory notion of “substantive due process” -- the belief that a law can be ruled unconstitutional under the Fifth and 14th amendments so long as the court doesn’t like the substance of the law. That’s asinine, obviously. Just in case I haven't made it clear: Reading this section was not a good time. We're in the home stretch now. Tomorrow, Ben goes international. Aramis fucked around with this message at 14:10 on May 2, 2022 |
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Oct 19, 2020 22:11
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I appreciate y'alls sacrifices to bring us insight into books that no well adjusted person would ever normally pick up and try to read.
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Oct 19, 2020 22:40
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Okay, after a bit of familial stress, I am back with chapter 2 of Nixonland. I do plan to keep going with this even though I have a snowball's chance in hell of actually finishing it on time; I'll just keep going until it's fuckin' done. Goddamn it's compelling- chapter 2 follows Nixon's development, from a dirty kid with a mean as gently caress dad to a high schooler who organised the less-popular kids into their own club, called the Orthogonians (a rather influential social club that wallowed in its own victimisation and made its "enemies" out to be far more powerful than they actually were), to a young man who couldn't get a job because he had no connections and not enough schooling, to a poker king in the Navy who was able to nearly self-fund his first Congressional race from his winnings. It notes that Nixon, as a kid, was always a brutally loyal team player and a master of seeing that a large swarm of also-rans was far more effective than a small team of social butterflies, and, more importantly, finding those also-rans in unexpected places. It then goes on to chart his various victories against Congress challengers, and then about the Alger Hiss hearings, then his Senate position, and finally the humiliation of people finding out that he had access to (legal and aboveboard) funding that wasn't his own salary during his vice presidential bid. Even then we can see the horrific classism of American voters, wheeling on Nixon and mocking him for being poor. Special focus is drawn to Eisenhower's decision to neither tell Nixon what to do, nor support him publicly. And the "Checkers Speech" moment is given beautiful clarity, highlighting what has been set up throughout the chapter- Nixon's real power residing in his willingness to be one of the striving poor struggling to make ends meet, with a not as nice car as he would like and a not as nice house as he would like, still paying down mortgages and working on an outstanding loan from his parents; and the true power, of being a victim, forced to make those facts known to the world because, as one of the poor, he would never, ever be allowed to grow up and consider himself an adult. Was it an act? Yeah. Was it real? Also yeah. If you've talked to an actor, you know that yes, they loving feel the feelings and they believe it, and in Nixon's case, yes, it was a particular look at his situation- but it was also, brutally, honest. Nixonland posted:He and Chotiner were chartering the Nixon method. You didn’t have to attack to attack. Better, much better, to give something to the mark: make him feel that he has one up on you. Let him pounce on your “mistake.” That makes him look unduly aggressive. Then you sprang the trap, garnering the pity by making the enemy look like a self-righteous and hyperintellectual enemy of common sense. You attacked jujitsu-style, positioning yourself as the attacked, inspiring a strange sort of protective love among voters whose wounded resentments grow alongside your performance of being wounded. Your enemies appear only to have died of their own hand. Which makes you stronger. Goddamn there's just so much good quote material in here. Somfin fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Oct 19, 2020 |
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Oct 19, 2020 22:41
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Somfin posted:Okay, after a bit of familial stress, I am back with chapter 2 of Nixonland. I do plan to keep going with this even though I have a snowball's chance in hell of actually finishing it on time; I'll just keep going until it's fuckin' done. Nixonland is seriously an amazing book, and honestly alot of the things talked about in there mimic or are similar to alot of things from the last decade. I fully think nixonland should be recommend reading to the whole forum, and in all honesty it deserves a lets read thread in the forum. There is so much potential and things to talk about. So many things occurred that led to a perfect storm and let nixon managed to thread a needle and win. And Nixon was goddamn nuts as hell it does not sugar coat anything on him. I just got reagonland and after I finish library on mount char im going to read that, im hoping its similar and just as good. UCS Hellmaker fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Oct 19, 2020 |
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Oct 19, 2020 23:07
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Herstory Begins Now posted:I appreciate y'alls sacrifices to bring us insight into books that no well adjusted person would ever normally pick up and try to read. Thanks! It's an interesting journey. Shapiro is so. much. worse. in writing than the clips of his talks and debates that are the main material circulated about him. It's honestly shocking. Nixonland sounds dope, I've got to get on that boat later.
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Oct 19, 2020 23:21
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UCS Hellmaker posted:And Nixon was goddamn nuts as hell it does not sugar coat anything on him. Absolutely it is not, but it is definitely neither sugarcoating nor, importantly, scapegoating, at least so far. He was a masterful operator, and as I quoted, the book points out that hating him, seeing through his bullshit, became an identity for liberals early on, well before he was contesting the presidency, and it was something he was absolutely fine with; being hated by the right people was his ideal, because he used that hatred against them. I'm approaching this with a measure of distance from American politics and very little backing in standard American political education; my understanding of Nixon is fairly broad and generic, and my knowledge of the history of that era is pretty dire. So, it's kind of cool to read it as, so far, a fairly neutral account of how this one striving genius seized a truly wild amount of political power at an incredibly young age through grit, hard work, impossibly good political reflexes and a willingness to get dirty.
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Oct 19, 2020 23:56
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Aramis posted:Nixonland sounds dope, I've got to get on that boat later. My recommendation is, before you read Nixonland, read Before The Storm. Its less interesting, because I think Goldwater was probably a less interesting person than Nixon, but its good setup about how the Republican party was tearing itself apart in the '60s and how the liberal and moderate wings had no idea how to deal with the rising conservative tide inside the party that threatened to disrupt everyrhing.
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Oct 20, 2020 00:01
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Epicurius posted:My recommendation is, before you read Nixonland, read Before The Storm. Its less interesting, because I think Goldwater was probably a less interesting person than Nixon, but its good setup about how the Republican party was tearing itself apart in the '60s and how the liberal and moderate wings had no idea how to deal with the rising conservative tide inside the party that threatened to disrupt everyrhing. The first chapter of Nixonland covers this to a certain degree, but probably not in nearly as much depth.
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Oct 20, 2020 00:06
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Somfin posted:Absolutely it is not, but it is definitely neither sugarcoating nor, importantly, scapegoating, at least so far. He was a masterful operator, and as I quoted, the book points out that hating him, seeing through his bullshit, became an identity for liberals early on, well before he was contesting the presidency, and it was something he was absolutely fine with; being hated by the right people was his ideal, because he used that hatred against them. I'm approaching this with a measure of distance from American politics and very little backing in standard American political education; my understanding of Nixon is fairly broad and generic, and my knowledge of the history of that era is pretty dire. So, it's kind of cool to read it as, so far, a fairly neutral account of how this one striving genius seized a truly wild amount of political power at an incredibly young age through grit, hard work, impossibly good political reflexes and a willingness to get dirty. Nixon was a master manipulator, and worked behind the scenes hard to come back to power. The Democrats tearing themselves apart due to civil rights and the race riots gave an opening that Nixon gladly used to bludgeon them harder and start the southern strategy that has been a hallmark of the GOP for the last 50 years. Like I said, in a lot of ways you can look at the same things and compare it to modern times, with Trump as a great example of the same issue that the GOP is now dealing with.
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Oct 20, 2020 00:31
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UCS Hellmaker posted:Nixon was a master manipulator, and worked behind the scenes hard to come back to power. The Democrats tearing themselves apart due to civil rights and the race riots gave an opening that Nixon gladly used to bludgeon them harder and start the southern strategy that has been a hallmark of the GOP for the last 50 years. Like I said, in a lot of ways you can look at the same things and compare it to modern times, with Trump as a great example of the same issue that the GOP is now dealing with. I hope I'm not spoiling it for Somfin, but it can't be overstated what Nixon did with the "southern strategy". Before him a lot of those states were democratic to the core, because before him the democrats actually were the racist party, and Nixon embraced that racism via Strom Thurmond, and turned it into electoral success. He was himself ambivalent at best about race issues, but he didn't mind courting the racist vote, and that's what paved the way to Reagan (who according to Perlstein was happy waiting for his turn, bizarrely enough) and Bush and now Trump. Nixon manufactured a culture of hatred for the republicans to stand on, and that is what brought us here today. Ironically, Nixon himself didn't care that much about domestic policy, he just wanted to play with foreign politics as president.
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Oct 20, 2020 01:08
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Based on those early chapters, it really gives credence to the idea that the psychology of obtaining power causes degeneration in the brain of those who are seeking it and getting it. 1962 Nixon seems like he'd never have sunk into the overwhelming paranoia of 1972 Nixon that resulted in Watergate and his name becoming a pejorative.
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Oct 20, 2020 15:34
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I walked away from this because the chapter was so disappointing. I'm back, I'll finish, but D'Souza is just such a tease. All sizzle no steak. Humbling The Overclass Alright, surely this chapter will be good. One chapter out of ten that isn't boring, that's not asking for much. quote:If we want to understand what kind of change has come to America, we should begin with Barack Obama. No, not that Barack Obama. I mean Barack Obama Sr.  We get a take that was cold ten years ago, and is positively Artic now: quote:Obama's energy secretary has already declared carbon a "pollutant," even though without carbon no life forms on earth would exist. We turn now from lies about the environment and about Obama's incremental attempts at reform (did you know Americans hate small cars and Obama is forcing them onto us?) to the bank bailout and the rescuing of the overclass. You might think this would undermine D'Souza's title of the chapter and possibly the entire point of his book insofar as it can be said to have one. You would be completely correct. Two years after the greatest financial collapse in living memory D'Souza writes quote:Moreover, while it's clear that the financial sector was suffering a liquidity crisis, it's not clear that it was suffering a bankruptcy crisis. Panics can case people to act hastily, but in retrospect it's not obvious that a bailout of this magnitude was even necessary.  quote:If financial crises were merely the result of outbreaks of greed, Wall Street would be in perpetual crisis. Part of the rest of the chapter is spent blaming the government for 2008. Nothing to do with Obama, nothing to do with anti-colonialism as D'Souza uses the term, nothing to do with the book in general besides inflating page count. If you want a non-economist's understanding of how 2008 happened D'Souza has you covered. Robosignings are not mentioned, people taking out loans they couldn't afford most definetly are. It's all individual mistakes, not a flawed system. D'Souza gets mad that Obama won't let the banks pay back the money they owe in the fashion the banks want, that he introduced the stress tests and made sure they could pass them so the government wouldn't have to bail them out again immediately. Obama rescues Detroit by rescuing the automakers, to D'Souza's disdain. quote:Detroit is going under because it deserves to go under. Obama signs Dodd-Frank, which a decade on we can admit was far less sweeping than advertised but D'Souza believes it's entirely a means of castigating the financial industry and brings the financial sector under federal control. Finally we get to the thing that offends D'Souza the most, Obama trying to stimulate the economy and create jobs. It's just conservative economics 101, you've read it or heard it before. The bottom 40 percent of income earners pay nothing all that bullshit. Taxation is unfair to the rich, everyone needs to have skin in the game, if it's a poorly sourced or completely made up conservative position on wealth it's here. Obamacare comes up, and for a miracle D'Souza doesn't dismiss it as socialism. quote:Obama is quite happy to rally corporate capitalists to his side with the promise of big bucks-as long as the corporate capitalists are willing to succumb to a government leash and to being told what to do by Big Daddy Obama.  quote:...The current economic upheaval will only hasten the move to a post-American world" While most Americans are likely to view this change with foreboding, I see a lone man in the Oval Office watching these trends that he has helped to exacerbate, cheering them on and grinning in triumph.  As an aside, I'm not convinced this book was written for anyone. I can't imagine this being useful to someone trying to get a new perspective on Obama, no reputable professor could assign it except in a media criticism course, there's no audience afaict.
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Oct 20, 2020 15:44
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Cornwind Evil posted:Based on those early chapters, it really gives credence to the idea that the psychology of obtaining power causes degeneration in the brain of those who are seeking it and getting it. I don't feel that's the actual issue. Nixon wasn't undergoing any brain degeneration he honestly was very mentally strong unlike Reagon. The underlying issue was he became extremely paranoid and was always some level of paranoid even before he ran for president. Nixon was known to be constantly watching for how to keep control, if anything the biggest thing was he was a massive control freak that led to his extreme paranoia as the house of cards fell apart. He literally would have won with no issue in 72 but his need for complete control and certainty led to him authorizing the Watergate breakin, from there his need to control the narrative and environment and inability to due so led to his paranoia and breakdown. After everything was done and he was finally out of the public spotlight he showed the same tenacity towards rebuilding his image, utilizing contacts and specific appearances to whitewash everything he did. There really is no evdicnce of any mental degeneration, at best it shows that as a control freak loses control they lashout and become unstable. People that crave power always tend to be some manner of control freak, and Nixon is not alone in how he turned out when that control was questioned or lost. But there is no evidence of the same mental degeneration that we saw with reagon (who didn't really have the same control issues ( and was already in a level of mental decline in the 80s)) and trump who has been in noticeable mental decline over the last 4 years
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Oct 20, 2020 16:01
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Yea, I think with Nixon its less "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and more someone who always has had the same traits, but now as President has the power to exercise them as fully as possible.
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Oct 20, 2020 16:06
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:Yea, I think with Nixon its less "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and more someone who always has had the same traits, but now as President has the power to exercise them as fully as possible. Seriously want to to do a lets read of nixonland when I get done with this semester, Its seriously well worth it go chapter by chapter and discuss exactly what and how nixon used public dissent and anger to take power, and let his control take everything from him because of his fear.
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Oct 20, 2020 16:08
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Relevant Tangent posted:Obama's energy secretary has already declared carbon a "pollutant," even though without carbon no life forms on earth would exist. This is so stupid they have to know it's stupid and just like get some kind of thrill out of frustrating people by being massively publicly stupid. "You hate carbon so much you expel carbon dioxide with every breath, but isn't nearly every molecule in your body made of carbon? Checkmate, respirationists!"
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Oct 20, 2020 16:36
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:Yea, I think with Nixon its less "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and more someone who always has had the same traits, but now as President has the power to exercise them as fully as possible. I think one of the things that breaks Nixon a little is the 1960 election. Here he is, the vice president of a popular president, who's been there, who's stood up to the Russians, who went down to South America and got spat on and took it, who's given so much, and then the President won't even endorse him, and he loses to a rich man's son with no significant legislative record who bought the election. It just goes to show....
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Oct 20, 2020 17:06
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Aramis posted:Shapiro is so. much. worse. in writing... This cannot be emphasized enough. I've only listened to audio versions but his writing is astonishingly bad. Like high school bad. I don't know if he just doesn't use editors, do drafts and rewrites or what but his writing is subjectively terrible, which is not usually a term I use to describe creative endeavors. I mean, just basic stuff like repeating adjectives and adverbs in consecutive sentences, using words like "optically" or "audibly" to describe how someone saw or heard something ("Looking around, he optically took in the scene surrounding him" or "Listening closely, he could audibly make out the words being spoken behind the door")* is rampant in his work. He really writes like that. Even without commentary it's LOL terrible. * not actual quotes but close enough
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Oct 20, 2020 17:11
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Epicurius posted:I think one of the things that breaks Nixon a little is the 1960 election. Here he is, the vice president of a popular president, who's been there, who's stood up to the Russians, who went down to South America and got spat on and took it, who's given so much, and then the President won't even endorse him, and he loses to a rich man's son with no significant legislative record who bought the election. It just goes to show.... Alongside that, it should not be understated how much Dwight did not like Nixon. Dwight literally felt Nixon was a snake and shouldn't be trusted and did not like how Nixon was working behind the scenes particularly with McCarthy. There is alot of sugarcoating by the Nixon apologists but there was a reason Dwight never really campaigned for Nixon and had the famous line of asking him in a week for anything supportive of him.
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Oct 20, 2020 17:18
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UCS Hellmaker posted:Alongside that, it should not be understated how much Dwight did not like Nixon. Dwight literally felt Nixon was a snake and shouldn't be trusted and did not like how Nixon was working behind the scenes particularly with McCarthy. There is alot of sugarcoating by the Nixon apologists but there was a reason Dwight never really campaigned for Nixon and had the famous line of asking him in a week for anything supportive of him. I'm not entirely sure this is true. Eisenhower didn't dislike Nixon, but after watching him for eight years felt that he lacked the temperament for the office. In 1956 he tried to coerce Nixon into accepting State or Defense instead of being VP again, under the guise of burnishing his foreign policy credentials for 1960. Nixon realized what Ike was doing, however--he knew that removing himself from the ticket would imply that Eisenhower didn't trust him enough to be second-in-command, so how could Americans trust him to run the show four years later? I think that this was the origin point for many of the things that happened in 1960 re: Eisenhower's seeming reluctance to full-throatedly endorse Nixon.
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Oct 20, 2020 17:56
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UCS Hellmaker posted:I don't feel that's the actual issue. Nixon wasn't undergoing any brain degeneration he honestly was very mentally strong unlike Reagon. The underlying issue was he became extremely paranoid and was always some level of paranoid even before he ran for president. Nixon was known to be constantly watching for how to keep control, if anything the biggest thing was he was a massive control freak that led to his extreme paranoia as the house of cards fell apart. He literally would have won with no issue in 72 but his need for complete control and certainty led to him authorizing the Watergate breakin, from there his need to control the narrative and environment and inability to due so led to his paranoia and breakdown. After everything was done and he was finally out of the public spotlight he showed the same tenacity towards rebuilding his image, utilizing contacts and specific appearances to whitewash everything he did. There really is no evdicnce of any mental degeneration, at best it shows that as a control freak loses control they lashout and become unstable. That is the tragedy of Nixon, though. He was so convinced that people, those God drat Kennedies, those God drat alumni from better schools, were out to get him. And he wasn't necessarily wrong on all counts. He made a career out of the "silent majority", because he did feel some connection with the young kid listening to that train whistle. He hosed LBJ over in a major way, and then did Watergate, because he felt he couldn't win otherwise. And maybe he couldn't? Nixon was an odd duck for a political animal, given that he had pretty much zero charisma. But he wanted to do away with war, and make a multi-polar world, and teamed up with Henry freaking Kissinger to do it, despite his... Questionable views on Jewish people. Richard Nixon is a war criminal, and he committed terrible things during his time as POTUS, but the same can be said of any post-WW1 POTUS.
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Oct 20, 2020 18:38
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Rappaport posted:But he wanted to do away with war I don't agree with this piece. He actually prolonged the Vietnam War to help win in 1968 by interfering in peace talks (he dispatched a campaign aide to the South Vietnamese embassy to pressure the South Vietnamese to back out with a promise to help them if he won) and invaded Cambodia in 1970: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...uggest-3595441/ quote:President Johnson had at the time a habit of recording all of his phone conversations, and newly released tapes from 1968 detailed that the FBI had “bugged” the telephones of the South Vietnamese ambassador and of Anna Chennault, one of Nixon’s aides. Based on the tapes, says Taylor for the BBC, we learn that in the time leading up to the Paris Peace talks, “Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.” The Atlantic Wire
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Oct 20, 2020 18:42
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Rappaport posted:That is the tragedy of Nixon, though. He was so convinced that people, those God drat Kennedies, those God drat alumni from better schools, were out to get him. And he wasn't necessarily wrong on all counts. He made a career out of the "silent majority", because he did feel some connection with the young kid listening to that train whistle. He hosed LBJ over in a major way, and then did Watergate, because he felt he couldn't win otherwise. And maybe he couldn't? Nixon was an odd duck for a political animal, given that he had pretty much zero charisma. But he wanted to do away with war, and make a multi-polar world, and teamed up with Henry freaking Kissinger to do it, despite his... Questionable views on Jewish people. The thing was nixon was slated to win, 72 the dems were really in the dark with a fractured base and deeply in the divide of the southern dixiecrats and the more traditional left dems due to the civil rights movement. McGovern was a weak candidate that never truly had a shot, and unlike today there wasn't as much news media that would be willing to constantly tear apart the government and 24/7 news. People heard things from the paper and radio, and the idea was that Nixon was removing us from Vietnam (even if it wasn't true). For the majority of people Nixon seemed like he was fulfilling his promises and things were getting better. His Paranoia was his downfall because he was so worried that he was going to fail that he authorized the robbery, which was the worst thing he could have done. He won with a margin that was huge, and was fine before and after the robbery he just couldn't believe that there was a chance he could lose and needed to know what the dems had planned. It wasn't just the young kids he won, he won handedly due to the latent racism and anger over the race riots, which was a major focus of white males, then the Vietnam war was a huge thing. Parents losing children and the more visceral actions that they could see on tv had a major effect on most people, and Nixon ran on stopping the war and bringing American teenagers home. It can't be stated how big a deal it was when every night you could watch the atrocities of war on the tv for the first time and the fear parents had of the draft sending their son off to war to die. Then it was so much more visceral when it never had been as visible as it was before. The idea Nixon was antiwar was cultivated by Nixon, he was incredibly smart and able to plan ahead on his actions, and would take any action that would increase his power. But the Cold war was a different time, with some things being deeper hidden. It would not be surprising at all that there were small skirmishes or wars that were setoff by the whitehouse at that time that no one found out about due to lack of the internet and communications at the time.
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Oct 20, 2020 18:51
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:I don't agree with this piece. He actually prolonged the Vietnam War to help win in 1968 by interfering in peace talks (he dispatched a campaign aide to the South Vietnamese embassy to pressure the South Vietnamese to back out with a promise to help them if he won) and invaded Cambodia in 1970: He did, in an effort to gently caress LBJ. I am falling back not on Nixonland here, but the bio by Farrell, and he makes it a point to argue that Nixon was profoundly shocked by what he saw in post-WW2 Europe, and that motivated him to do anything he could to domestically win the fight, as it were, in order to win the political might to try and defuse the Cold War dilemmas. Maybe that's too charitable a read?
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Oct 20, 2020 18:54
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Rappaport posted:He did, in an effort to gently caress LBJ. I am falling back not on Nixonland here, but the bio by Farrell, and he makes it a point to argue that Nixon was profoundly shocked by what he saw in post-WW2 Europe, and that motivated him to do anything he could to domestically win the fight, as it were, in order to win the political might to try and defuse the Cold War dilemmas. Maybe that's too charitable a read? I think the most charitable interpretation you could make is that he took the existential threat of nuclear annihilation seriously enough that he felt anything justified his end goal of "cooling" the Cold War (which, eh, maybe he did?) - but I don't think that reflects a deeper pacifist sentiment, but rather a justified concern with the world ending. I just can't square the circle between "Nixon was horrified at modern war and wanted to stop war" and "Nixon interfered to continue the Vietnam War and then expanded it when in office."
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Oct 20, 2020 18:56
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:I think the most charitable interpretation you could make is that he took the existential threat of nuclear annihilation seriously enough that he felt anything justified his end goal of "cooling" the Cold War (which, eh, maybe he did?) - but I don't think that reflects a deeper pacifist sentiment, but rather a justified concern with the world ending. Yeah, they didn't call it MAD for no reason, huh? (Sorry, I am making light of a serious thing, but also, who doesn't love Dr. Strangelove?)
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Oct 20, 2020 18:58
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VitalSigns posted:This is so stupid they have to know it's stupid and just like get some kind of thrill out of frustrating people by being massively publicly stupid. It's the same disordered thinking that Ben Shapiro has, assuming that the only reason anyone says anything is to score points for their side, that all conversation is fundamentally agonistic or antagonistic, and that evidence exists purely to be contorted and bent to one's liking like the text of a legal document or court ruling. "Objective truth" exists in the same sense that "checkmate" exists--just a declaration to indicate that you have the upper hand in the game of rhetoric.
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Oct 20, 2020 19:13
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| # ? May 9, 2024 08:50 |
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My International section is starting to be a bit on the long side, so I'll take the opportunity to yank out Nationalism, patriotism need not be opposites as it's own thing, because holy poo poo is it blatant and deserves a special spotlight:"Ben, |
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Oct 20, 2020 20:13
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, Shapiro posted: