Some people are beautiful souls and minds. @CornelWest is really one of them. During our conversation yesterday, knowing my parents were watching, he flipped one of his responses to take a moment to shout them both out by first name. I didn't even know he knew their names.
He always asks after your children. Always speaks to everyone in the zoom, especially the audio technician. Always prefaces any disagreement with a lot of respectful and often complimentary engagement with your point in its best light. I have so much to learn from that example.
Last thing, and in contrast to today’s fashion, he has read everything. EVERYTHING.
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A lot of injustice occurs below Franzen's threshold for caring:
“There’s a chilling of nuanced discourse…but I also think, until people start being sent off to Lubyanka for having said the wrong thing to the wrong person, the risk is probably overblown”
He seems to overlook the fact that he is one of the very few writers big enough to ride out the type of mobbing and slander he himself has faced. He'd have been cancelled several times if he weren’t in a particularly privileged position.
Unlike Malcolm Gladwell or the other big names who signed the letter, it's pretty disappointing someone of his stature and talent doesn't want to think harder now about this issue or from a different vantage point.
We have spent the past few years debating how oppressive the U.S. is. These images of Afghans clinging to a U.S. plane and falling from the sky are a damn sobering reminder that while there are no utopias, we'd better appreciate the society we were lucky enough to be born into.
I'll expand this beyond the U.S. I have had conversations with well-to-do Parisians this past year who have said with a straight face that President Macron is "authoritarian," "a tyrant." Let's get some perspective.
If you're lucky enough to be born into a prosperous democracy that isn't dependent on the whims of a foreign presence to keep the forces of chaos and murder at bay, you ought to be critical when necessary but also deeply grateful for the present without being stuck in the past.
I've recently fallen afoul of both a kind of conservative Twitter (for NYT op-ed against CRT bans) and a kind of social justice Twitter (for assorted wrongthink). Both attacked, but I say this seriously––only a part of "woke" Twitter tried to criticize my physical appearance.
It's only anecdotal experience, but it seriously makes me wonder what kind of progress these "progressives" believe they're fighting for and why they believe their ends can justify any kind of nasty means, which, in theory, they would say they're against.
Conservative Twitter gets angry for sure, but only woke Twitter will be like, "the way you are holding your glass of wine is so stupid." LMAO