WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2023
...by his reference to "national survival?" We've lost a chunk of time this morning, with a bit more time loss to come.
For that reason, we'll offer only a very brief post concerning what Brooks has now said.
As we noted yesterday, David Brooks has written a book with the following clunky title:
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
In this past weekend's Sunday Review, the New York Times published a lengthy essay by Brooks. The essay was adapted from his new book. Online, the essay appears beneath this headline:
The Essential Skills for Being Human
On the surface, this project can possibly start to seem a tiny bit touchy-feely! But as we noted yesterday, Brooks eventually offered this passage in his lengthy New York Times essay:
BROOKS (10/22/24): Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival. We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.
"We live in a brutalizing time," Brooks wrote. "We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist."
We live in a brutalizing time! With respect to that assertion, Brooks also offered this:
"Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival."
According to Brooks, our national survival turns on our ability to develop a certain set of skills. He refers to the social skills we need to live in our "wonderfully diverse society."
Full disclosure:
As we've noted in the past, "a wonderfully diverse society" can also turn into a Babel. Brooks says our nation's survival is at stake:
What can he mean by that?
Tomorrow: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
This afternoon: New York Times, please!
Yesterday, those PISA scores. Today, the gender wage gap!
"On the surface, this project can possibly start to seem a tiny bit touchy-feely! "
ReplyDeleteThis could possibly be how someone sort of kind of says something without actually saying it, just a little bit, superficially, Somerby says.
What does "a tiny bit touchy feely" even mean?
Somerby was busy this morning and didn't have time to write much. Even so, he repeats the same paragraph three times, twice in its entirety and once just the first line and then he paraphrases it for a fourth repetition. Then he gets to his real point -- he thinks the diversity of our nation is a problem.
ReplyDeleteThen, instead of explaining why he thinks diversity is bad, he quotes Thoreau without attribution and without linking the quote to anything said earlier.
If I were to count the words that are Somerby's and the words that were written by someone else, Somerby would come out on the short end. So, today's essay is a lesson to students everywhere about how to pad an essay without expressing a single idea (except the one that says diversity is a threat to our nation's survival) and without explaining anything.
It would be better to post a simple statement "No fish today, I am busy with other things" than to post this crap today.
There is nothing wrong with a touchy feelie, self helpish tome from a guy who is primarily known
ReplyDeleteas a Op Ed political writer.
But it’s fair to speculate that his
need to reach across to his own
set of hard to comprehend
“Others” (liberals) is actually a
flight from the twisted hatred of
his own bonkers tribe.
As for Bob why does he center
on MSNBC’s presenting its
commentators as a gang of
favorite pals ( yes, I have been
known to grown too) rather than
the validity of what they have to
say? As a writer and thinker, Bob
should be humiliated by this
weeks convictions for Forgery
In Georgia, and the implications
have much more significance
than Nichole Wallace wanting to
throw a little smarm into the
mix.
The revaluation that nice,
hard working, utterly likable
people can have wretched
politics is not exactly a shocker
to people who have knocked
around a bit. Sometimes they
are just people you disagree
with. Sometimes you can live
with those disagreements,
sometimes not. Sometimes
getting along results in looking
away from things you really
ought not to. There are no hard
and fast rules. But to assign
all blame and responsibility to
one side is a recipe for
intellectual disaster, and
that’s why the DH sucks now.
Unintentional humor provided by Chat GPT. Today the NY Times has an article headed: "Can We Save the Redwoods by Helping Them Move? The largest trees on the planet can’t easily ‘migrate’ — but in a warming world, some humans are helping them try to find new homes."
ReplyDeleteBeside in (online) is a picture and it is read, but what kind of trees are those? The excessively literal AI found some red trees but they are not redwoods and have nothing to do with redwood trees. When you click the link, the read trees appear, but they are unaccountably purple.
"Oh brave new world..." that has such trees in it.
And here is where that quote comes from:
"O brave new world, That has such people in't. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free." Shakespeare, The Tempest
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/magazine/redwoods-assisted-migration.html
Deletetypo correction: "Beside in (online) is a picture and it is read, but what kind of trees are those?" Should be Beside it (onlie) is a picture and it is red...
Delete
ReplyDeleteNytimes in general, and especially their "opinion page". Who reads this nonsense anymore? You do, obviously. But do you know anyone else who does? Seriously.
"Yesterday, those PISA scores. Today, the gender wage gap!"
ReplyDeleteYippee! Somerby is going to bash women again for daring to suggest they aren't equally paid with men.
Did Somerby finally discover that a woman won this year's Nobel Prize in Economics, for her research on how women have been underpaid for centuries, how they are expected to do two full-time jobs (one at work, one at home) and the structural problems that keep women earning less than men. I won't hold my breath. I think he will probably be bashing some woman for repeating that there is a gender gap when he thinks there isn't, economic that he isn't.
But we will wait and see what he comes up with.
Off Topic
ReplyDeleteI was wrong. I pooh-poohed an anti-Trump talking point that Trump was actually less wealthy than he claimed. The Wall Street Journal reported today that testimony from Trump's former lawyer supports the point that Trump was indeed less rich than he claimed to be.
Michael Cohen Testifies Trump Ordered Him to Inflate Wealth
The former president and his fixer-turned-foe came face-to-face in a Manhattan courtroom five years after their bitter split.
David is strong enough to admit an error.
DeleteThanks for acknowledging this. You might ask yourself what else he is lying about.
DeleteD in c - I remember the 2016 GOP debates when trump boasted how rich he was. I don't recall the exact amount of his alleged worth, I think 10 Billion - largely, maybe mostly, arising from the value of his "brand." I'm a dem and think the dems have gone off the rails on several things (just look at the comments here0 but how it reached the point that the GOP has allowed this guy to run, and to put him in office is bizarre and destructive. Never mind transforming yourself per Brooks' touchy-feelie advice, more sanity would be something I would welcome.
DeleteIt is preposterous - after all that has been written about Trump's lying in reference to his personal wealth and the value of his properties, coupled with the vast number of lies he has told as documented by fact checkers - to have attributed the discrediting of his personal wealth statements to a "talking point". This is the mindset of Trump cult loyalists. A mountain of evidence has been documented that Trump has lied about literally countless numbers of facts, of various levels of significance. To assume at face value that he has been truthful about the one thing that gives him claim to genius stature is comically naive. Trump's self inflated worth has been criticized by a wide variety of outlets over the years, but DIC treats this issue as if it is a debate between an honorable man and and a politically motivated detractor. This is what democracy is up against. Purposeful self-delusionment in the service of a habitual liar.
DeleteSpeaking of national survival, how do we govern our nation when members of one party disavow our Constitution? From Rawstory this morning:
ReplyDelete"At a hearing of the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, Frost asked witness Amanda Tyler about the violent role of Christian nationalism in America.
"It uses the symbols and the language of Christianity to try to justify what is indefensible," Tyler explained. "And it turns, again, their hatred into a religious cause, into something that they believe is ordained by God."
Frost pointed out that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had called Christian nationalism a "good thing."
And he added, "My colleague, Rep. Lauren Boebert, said, quote, The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk, end quote."
"Junk being the Constitution and Bill of Rights," Frost explained.
https://www.rawstory.com/maxwell-frost-lauren-boebert/
This morning I am watching the House try to conduct yet another speaker vote. Watching the process live, this evaluation seems even more accurate:
ReplyDelete"But every day the GOP makes clear that it doesn't care about "policy ... or budgets or anything real." It's an entire party of "rock-throwers," and it's been heading in the direction since long before Trump took that escalator ride."
Pundits are arguing whether Trump is leading the Republican party or whether it is leaderless. Given the dysfunction in the House, leaderlessness seems most accurate. From Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog:
https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2023/10/trump-is-unserious-leader-of-unserious.html
We could be as nice as nice to these guys (and their supporters) and it wouldn't change a thing about their inability to govern.
DeleteYastreblansky says in a comment at the blog:
Delete"There's also a kind of serious element that recognizes Trump as a leader and has all kinds of plans. The way Lowry treats McCarthy ("coalition builder" my ass) is like a parody of sober punditry, that's just nonsense, but there are now people really at work at developing an alternative to democracy--the Red Caesarists of the Claremont Institute, the international-fascist Bannonites, and the advocates of "Project 2025" hoping to establish an actual Trumpist deep state in place of the civil service.
Trump's hold on his voters, which is clearly real, is directly connected to these developments, which is why congressional Republicans get involved in them, whether it's by favoring Russia over Ukraine, encouraging election denialism, blocking Biden nominees, or the current semi-dissolution of the House (showing voters that we don't even need an elected legislature). He's the leader whether he has the capacity to lead or not."
I tend to agree with this.
Correction: I might possibly a tiny bit tend to agree with this, because anything is possible.
I am not Corby or Somerby.
You are Maoby.
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