Weekly Digest – May 8, 2016

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Weekly Digest – May Day 2016

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Weekly Digest – April 24, 2016

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Good language

Episode 3 –

Daughter, age 7, to son, age 5:  “Stop talking like an eight-year-old.”

Episode 2 –

Me to son:  “What would happen if a pack of coyotes got into the house?”  [Note:  It’s important to ask kids questions like this to keep them on their toes.]

Son:  “They’d wreck it looking for our meat stash.”

Me:  “… Our meat stash?”

Son:  “Yeah, the bacon and sausage we keep in the fridge.”

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Thought leaders

I hate the term “thought leaders”, perhaps because most of those considered such are lightweights.  Be that as it may, hearing the term for the n-th time the other day got me thinking about whose writing has been most influential on my thinking.  In no particular order:  Christopher Lasch, Noam Chomsky, Hunter S. Thompson, and Robert Adams.

I read a lot of Lasch 20-25 years ago.  His critiques of materialism and the liberal notion progress were spot on.  They remain so.  Agree or disagree with Chomsky’s politics, he sets an example for how to think critically about political power and its application.  Thompson got greed and the darker side of human behavior.  He’s a good complement to Chomsky in terms calling out both subtle and unsubtle uses of power for nefarious ends.  “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72” is one of the best books I’ve ever read.  Robert Adams makes the list for articulating an aesthetic sensibility in “Beauty in Photography”.

Weekly Digest – April 17, 2016

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Lessons learned?

By his own admission, President “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars” made the same mistake in Libya that President “Mission Accomplished” made in Iraq. It’s almost as if that Best and the Brightest thing doesn’t always work out.

Obama’s admission that his failure to plan for a post-reconstruction Libya was his greatest mistake—and his concomitant refusal to say that the intervention was a mistake—makes me wonder how many times a government gets to make the same “mistake” before we get to say that the mistake is no mistake but how the policy works.

I mean when you have a former University of Chicago Law School professor/former Harvard Law Review editor doing the exact same thing that his alleged ignoramus of a predecessor did in Iraq, when you see that the failure to plan for a post-intervention reconstruction is not a contingency but a bipartisan practice, don’t you start wondering about the ideology of intervention itself?

Corey Robin

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