Barak Obama

The President

Excerpt from "Civilization" by Niall Ferguson

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Dinesh ^club

That whole philosophy of persistence…is one that I’m going to emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come, as long as I am in this office. I’m a big believer in persistence. I think that…if we keep on working at it, if we acknowledge that we make mistakes sometimes and that we don’t always have the right answer, and we’re inheriting very knotty problems, that we can pass health care, we can find better solutions to our energy challenges, we can teach our children more effectively…I’m sure there’ll be more criticism and we’ll have to make more adjustments, but we’re moving in the right direction. – President Barack Obama, March 24, 2009

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Today, a man with an African father and a white mother – a man who would have been called a casta in Simon Bolivar’s day – is the President of the United States, having defeated a decorated war hero of classic Scotch-Irish origin even in the state of Virginia. That is something that would have seemed a fantastically remote possibility as recently as thirty years ago, when I first visited the American South. It is easy to forget that, as late as 1967, sixteen states still had laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. It was only with the Supreme Court judgment in the aptly named ‘Loving v. Virginia’ that legal prohibition of interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional throughout the United States. Even then, Tennessee did not formally repeal the relevant article of its constitution until March 1978 and Mississippi put off doing so until December 1987. American racial attitude have changed profoundly since that time. a whole time-honoured complex of words and thoughts can no longer publicly be uttered. ~ Page 138 Excerpt "Civilization" - Author Niall Ferguson

10 years ago. Edited 13 days ago.

Dinesh ^club

Particularly in the United States, much of the left stopped thinking several decades ago about ambitious social policies that might help remedy the underlying conditions of the poor. It was easier to talk about respect and dignity than to come up with potentially costly plans that would concretely reduce inequality. A major exception was President Obama, whose Affordable Care Act was a milestone in U.S Social policy. 5h3 QCA’s opponents tried to frame it as an identity issue, suggesting sotto voce (in a quiet voice, as if not to be overheard) that the policy was designed by a black president to help his black constituents. But it was in fact a national policy designed to help less well-off Americans, regardless of their race or identity. Many of the law’s beneficiaries include rural whites in the South who have nonetheless been persuaded to vote for Republican politicians vowing to repeal the ACA ~ Page 178 Excerpt: "Identity" Author" Francis Fukuyama

3 years ago. Edited 15 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

This limited-resource theory of willpower has been influential . it has spawned best selling books, including one by Baumeister and John Tierney called ‘Willpower.” One piece of advice they offer is that one should be careful not to use up one’s willpower on unnecessary tasks. You would’t tire out a muscle before a weight-lifting competition, would you? I knew this research was having an impact when I saw that Barack Obama, when he was president, was paying attention to this particular piece of advice. He talked about it during the interview with Michael Lewis:

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he (Obama) said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I ‘m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. “You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia” ~ Page 126

~ Excerpt "Sweet Spot" ~ Paul Bloom

14 months ago. Edited 13 days ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . It was shrew of Barack Obama to quote King, quoting Amos, ( “No, no, we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream” ) in 2007, when he announced his candidacy for the U.S. precedence: “We welcomed immigrants to our shores. We opened railroads to the west. We landed a man on the moon. And he had a King’s call to let “justice roll down like water,” and righteousness like a mighty stream. We’ve done this before.” He thus made the image of the elemental, ineluctable momentum of racial justice do double work. It made abstracts like ‘justice’ feel visceral and material, but also invited his audience to resurrect King in their minds, speaking before the Lincoln Memorial, and compare the changes which Obama now proposed to oversee the president with those brought about by the 1960 civil rights movement. ~ Page 96

13 days ago. Edited 13 days ago.

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