Obama enjoys championing reading. Did I say that? In other words, Limbaugh is trying to swiftboat Obama’s obvious strength—his nuanced intelligence. Obama as professor- I don’t know what his students called him but that would be an interesting addition to the conversation! That scares me, as it should anyone who values freedom and seeks personal achievement restricted only by their willingness to pursue it. When you say that, in one or more instances, faith trumps for you good reasons, logic, and evidence, to whom do you give that deference as the messenger of your faith? As a young man in Chicago, for example, Obama characteristically spent: many hours holed up in a spartan apartment with volumes of ‘philosophy and literature.’ “Writers should submit stories ranging from depictions of his absurdity to the impact of his politics on the disenfranchised, our international friends, and world peace,” requests itsalltrumpedup.com.
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing As for your concern that the leader of a capitalist country (we are actually a mixed economy) would not have read Adam Smith, why do you presume that he hasn’t? It galls them that Obama is, by orders of magnitude, smarter and better educated than they are. ( Log Out / Pingback: A Prince Amidst Satyrs: Barack Obama’s Equanimity in the Midst of the Right-Wing Shit Storm | Prometheus Unbound, Pingback: I Saw Dinesh D’Souza’s Documentary, “2016″ | Prometheus Unbound. The deadline for submissions is 31 August. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Why, in other words, does your skepticism stop where it does, and attach itself to some targets but not others? It’s the only way they can accommodate his running up 1 and a half trillion dollar deficits two years in a row. Obama, by all accounts, has been a lifelong bibliophile.
they will nitpick the books he reads because they don’t like him. I could reply with a witty and lengthy diatribe, but I think I can sum it up by saying that is a load of crap. [Obama] has read “Rules for Radicals,” according to his campaign; it would be hard to find any thoughtful community organizer who hasn’t.
Well, if we are talking about putting faith in a human being, and why I would put faith in one human being over another, that would be in observing that person. i just don’t share your obama-skepticism, at least not yet. I gave you a link from the very liberal Huffington Post making it clear that he was not considered a regular professor. Written with a vigor and a panache that amply convey Alinsky’s legendary charisma, it is less a primer than a concise, witty and iconoclastic manifesto crossed with a war manual à la Sun Tzu. It’s difficult to say what Obama might have absorbed from the German philosopher, mostly because Nietzsche himself is so hard to pin down, but one of Obama’s favorite instructors at Occidental told Mendell that anyone who immersed themselves in his thought would learn “to call everything into question.”, Obama told Brooks that what he’d taken from Niebuhr is “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And do you take anything on faith that is absent of strict reasons? i think it is very important for the world to move in a lockean direction that respects property rights and civil liberties. And he has a history of literary reading and writing. I am not trying to make up reasons to discount him. And I suppose that you’re also careful—in the name of advancing your political ideology—not to call torture, well, torture. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Actually, those deficits were intended to benefit, and pay off, Democratic constituencies.
You do realize that experts in evaluating evidence (that is, scientists and professors at major universities) overwhelmingly accept the first two and dismiss the “evidence” for the third.
In Obama’s case, by the way, it is nearly inescapable to not pick up the racist connotations in Limbaugh’s argument. I also find it to be rather far out of the realm of possibility, considering his political agenda, especially relating to economics, that he hasn’t memorized every word that Marx and Engels ever put to paper. USAers are funny people… even the intellectuals are afraid of ideas. • Team of Rivals:The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
That means that he has read THOUSANDS of books in his lifetime, and I’ll bet that means that he has read these people too. Tell me why this constitutes a piece of poor evidence, and why it doesn’t “satify” your skeptical intelligence. When did I say that? They were: All That Is, by James Salter; All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr; The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert; The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri; Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow. You would know that if YOU read economics. i found the poems, and yale prof. bloom’s comments on them, of considerable interest. That’s odd because I got no pop ups.
With the start of 2020 just days away, former President Obama is giving fans a look back at the best books he read over the past year. Also, Obama had to fight through numerous unscripted debates with Hillary Clinton.
And as for the jokes written for Obama for a speech, how does this indicate Obama’s shallowness? • What Is the What by Dave Eggers Are you referring to the writers of the Bible, the people who put the Bible together and decided what would be in it, the Pope, the Reverend Moon? Stylistically, the model can only be Nietzsche; the book is full of breathtakingly provocative assertions and nifty aphorisms.
What’s wrong with it, exactly? Pingback: A Song for Barack Obama: “Stuck in the Middle with You” « Prometheus Unbound, Pingback: Why I love the man « Prometheus Unbound. You say you wonder whether Obama reads poetry. • Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll “We Rule You, We Fool You”: Classic 1911 Poster Depicting Capitalism Titled “Pyramid of Capitalist System”, The Journey Starts Now: How To Discover What Motivates Us - Yellow Parachute Learning Partners, Human Beings are “Purpose Maximizers, Not Profit Maximizers”, Commercial Project 1 from start to finish – Meg Dobson-Armstrong Art, Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?
However, I don’t follow politicians with blind faith because I don’t think they,as a group, have earned that. Obama’s holiday picks are always guaranteed a sales boost, but he is not the first president to enjoy a good book. I can see why some people wanted to believe in him before the election. If Obama had been full-time, I suppose you would have noted that he didn’t have tenure, and so this made him “not a real professor.”. I would agree strongly here. I think that, throughout Western cultural history, there has always been the danger of creating a Hobbesian Leviathan State that chokes human liberty (economic and civil). i may be wrong about this, but i genuinely believe that obama is more a lockean than a hobbesian. You betcha! Afterlives by Adbulrazah Gurnah, review: love and loss in German East Africa. Miller describes Obama as a devourer of books, and that means that Obama has gleaned insights from thousands of books over his lifetime. Why did you put the word “full time” in my mouth? I don’t recall saying that I felt everyone in the religious community was above reproach. I want to know whether your ability to judge evidence is sound. I am sincere in my belief that he is intellectually overrated. Few book-lovers anywhere, let alone the man occupying the hot seat in the White House, could match Theodore Roosevelt, who consumed books at a rate of one a day when busy and two to three when he had a free evening. If this country had nearly the number of racists that we are made out to have, he would never have been elected or even been in the Senate. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he’d given her. It’s a form of nihilism and postmodern cynicism to treat truth as completely malleable, but the game that you are playing obviously works. You would think he would be happy to let that be known. As for Obama, can you name a person who has spent extended time with him who has expressed doubts about the brightness of his intellect or his intellectual range? And let me ask you if the evidence for global warming and evolution satisfy you. And thanks for letting me share them. if i’m wrong about this, then i’ll vote against him in 2012. but i really think the country needs to give this young idealist an opportunity to exercise his political skills on the national and international stage. In an interview with People magazine in December 2015, he said that his favourite book of the year was the novel Fates and Furies by Lauren Goff. This ties in with his teaching as well, as he taught Alinsky. Charles Darwin and Politics: Very Gradual Change We Can Believe In? This doesn’t mean I think he is a fool. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. It’s a busy Monday, but I appreciate your time in the post above and will try to answer briefly. They live in a black and white world (in all respects), and Obama disrupts that narrative for them. Liberals take Obama’s “intellectualism” as a matter of faith. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. He was a Harvard editor of his law school journal, a professor before he was a politician, and very smart people who have spent extended hours with Obama all testify to his intelligence and intellectual nature. • Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathan Alte
Or is your skepticism all in one direction?