https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1870153606822797692
I always look forward to sharing my annual list of favorite books, movies, and music. Today Iβll start by sharing some of the books that have stuck with me long after I finished reading them.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 20, 2024
Check them out this holiday season, preferably at an independent bookstore or library! pic.twitter.com/NNcAnaFzdU
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
He's half yt and was raised by yt
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
One drop rule he goes into the wypipo camps with the rest
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
obama
is 100% indog
his bro
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
A bunch of decent-to-mediocre popular contemporary literary fiction is exactly what I'd expect Barack Obama to have on his reading list. Never understood the conspiracies here.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Because you don't have any experience dealing with someone who is a personal brand. I know significantly less famous people than Obama who still employ a team of 4 people that craft all of their "candid" social media posts to curate a specific perception about themselves. Good PR teams are incredibly neurotic and maintaining some cynicism around how much stuff they actually touch is reasonable.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Seriously, I'd more surprised if Obama wasn't an Adam Moss fan. He's definitely the type to prefer New York while pretending to prefer The New Yorker.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
This is fricking such a fricking highly specific diss that
is fricking 100% accurate
gives lie to the fricking notion that this whole site is fricking basement dwelling neets who failed out of 8th grade for huffing spraypaint.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
We can't have politicians meme Reflections on Violence by George Sorel or The Crowd by Gustave LeBon
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
He literally runs the democratic party from the shadows and he published these when he was in office
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
!r-slurs
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
You're right i meant he runs it for some jews from the shadows
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
A book a month is easy mode, that's like 15 pages a day
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
why didn't he run the fricking democratic party to win then, b-word?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
He's a dei hire
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I knew the Sally Rooney book would be on there before opening also is he trying to start a book club like Oprah? Share this to your Goodreads account
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I looked at IRL book clubs and Intermezzo was always on the list, they are all run by girls
I ended up buying it on kindle anyway and it was pretty good, although the writing style is hard to get into
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
You're not a foid?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
You know he's an accomplished lawyer from Harvard, right?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Frick lawyers.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
True
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Lmbo.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Becoming President is scare-quote accomplished. Rightoids lmao.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
What does that have to do with his lawyering? Which is what you were talking about.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Has nothing to do with being a lawyer, you redditor
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Dude, do you even know he's black? He's a meth dealing hooligan.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Leftoids tend to really hate Jonathan Haidt, and his latest book about taking away children's phones makes a lot of younger Redditors mad.
Example r/skeptic seethe
r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM seethe over Haidt badmouthing "antiracist" movements
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Yep, he's a known IDW chud who thinks that leftoids should talk to righteous instead of screeching at them.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
I believe it. Obama is a nerd. He seems like the kind of guy who'd get bullied for being too mayo when he was younger.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
He's literally a coconut lmao
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
This is a more complicated question than you would first think. If you're curious about Obama then you know the truth is Obama is secretly a pretentious nerd pretending to be a cool guy.
Here is a letter he wrote to his girlfriend in college:
I haven't read 'The Waste Land' for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statementsβEliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from MΓΌnzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this.
Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he's less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalismβEliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it's due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letterβlife feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
But wait, oops. Obama actually didn't really write that letter and Maraniss essentially laundered these heavily editorialized fabrications for the Obama campaign so people would think:
"The Obama campaign has been lying to me. The real Obama is a pretentious nerd."
No. The real Obama was screaming at his 2008 campaign staff "not on my court" whenever they wouldn't let him win at Basketball. (Cousin worked on his campaign)
Why did they feel they had to go so hard fabricating this Obam-nerd psyslop everywhere in 2012? I genuinely don't know. Maybe they thought the Ayers association would be used as an attack during his re-election campaign and wanted people to have already "filled-in-the-blank" for that period of his life.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
no way
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Source?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
What? Maraniss claims he got to read the official archive of Obama's letters for his 2012 book, and then Emory University admits that there never was an archive because they received the originals directly from his girlfriend Alex McNear in 2014, and then McNear admits that actually the "originals" she let Maraniss read were not the originals. She rewrote the real letters and redacted statements like 'I make love to men daily, but in the imagination' from them and let Maraniss read those, and also that was the official archive Maraniss consulted for his book. By the way, nobody is allowed to see or photograph the originals from Emory's archive. Historians are publishing the 'I make love to men daily' line based on post-cards of what other people claim they read about in the original. You can take out photocopies of the "originals" from Emory's library but the photocopies don't have those redacted paragraphs, even though Emory's Rose Manuscript Archives don't contest David Garrow's account of the 1982 letters at all. If you're an official manuscript archive and someone is lying about you archiving forged manuscripts, you will challenge that because it's a deathblow to your credibility and persistence as an organization.
Anyway none of it really matters because Obama is pretty open about having made up the entire period of his life when he was a community organizer. When he was promoting this biography he told Maraniss "yeah I made up the girlfriends in my last biography, but in this biography I'm revealing the truth about my shadowgirlfriend Alex McNear even if I have to retroactively say I lied about everything else to make that fit" https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/05/obama-new-york-girlfriend-was-composite-122272
Look, those letters and that book are designed to cover precisely the period of time he was supposed to have met Bill Ayers and started studying community organizing with him, before he went to Columbia. The Obama campaign has always been supremely insecure about this period of his life and they keep getting caught in these weird lies by introducing more "proof' that it doesn't feel like they need to make.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Half of this, he actually read and the other half is on there to appeal to the NPR liberals he courts.
This is the same case with his favorite music post he also does every year with the countless Kendrick Lamar praise.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
the music picks are probably even faker than the books, there's no way obama's listening to billie eilish and charli xcx
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Sorry, I need to believe that Barack and I would vibe.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
wrong
this is obama's favorite 
bop
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Unironically Obama is a really smart, well-read guy.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
If I spent 8 years getting intelligence briefs every day I would be way too cynical to read a book by Jonathan Haidt or Daniel Susskind or Navalny. There is no way Obama is actually spending his time reading pop-slop hardcovers instead of mainlining information 120x more raw than whatever we think we're doing here.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I haven't read Navalny's book but it's supposed to be intense. I would absolutely not characterize the memoir of a dissident written while he was being slowly murdered in a Siberian gulag as "pop slop".
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It's pop slop because America's primary cultural export is how good it feels to be a dissident revolutionary dying for your beliefs. How many times do you think Obama has been briefed on this exact story for any number of dissidents all around the world? 2,000 times? 3,000? For how many of those incidents has he played the gulag-guard?
Realizing he could maintain the resolve to fight for the FBK in the face of what was now certain death was very profound for Navalny. But the feeling that you've won because you're not scared of the Russian state that's about to murder you is just fake moral power. It's shutting off your brain and letting pop-culture's universal denouement fill in the rest of the blanks--like the feeling you have a girlfriend because you let your arm fall asleep first, so anything could be true.
Obama has held actual power, and once you go Barrack you can't go back. Letting yourself get killed and calling it a win probably doesn't make sense anymore to someone who actually knows what winning is. Not like I can read Big O's mind, but I just can't believe Navalny's book has much he didn't know already, or has a moral thrust he doesn't passively view as trite.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Ok, so this will probably look ridiculous with the sharpen filter, but I think this is actually a super interesting question. What is power qua power? What does it mean to have power, to wield power?
Karl Marx never held a single political office, he never commanded troops in battle, he was editor at some shitty magazines so maybe generously he bossed around some pathetic broke lefty journos. But Marx's writing, his ideas, overturned empires and remade the world. I don't think it's an exaggeration to claim Marx as the most powerful figure of the 20th century, a century defined by the struggle between communism and capitalism.
Is Navalny on the same level as Marx? Probably not, but suppose his book and his martyrdom become the nucleation site for the end of Putin's regime. Suppose that triggers the breakup of the Russian federation. Is it possible that Navalny ends up a more influential figure in the eyes of history than Obama? I think it's entirely possible.
I've never been POTUS (obvs) or held any political office, but I have worked in large bureaucratic organizations with professional staff before, and it's fricking hard to get anything done. Even if you have all the power and authority in the world on paper, even if everyone is genuinely sincerely committed the same goal (not the case in the US federal bureaucracy), just communicating your vision clearly and double-checking that people aren't going off and doing some nonsense misinterpretation is a full time job.
I also can't read Obama's mind, but my guess is that being President is like a very stressful management gig at a very large company. You wonder if he's been the gulag guard, but I think it's far more impersonal than that. He's seen the line item on a spreadsheet or at most watched on a tv screen in the situation room when some dark shit went down. He has never been anywhere near the pointy tip of the spear of American power.
The other thing is that even honest-to-god dictators (someone like Kim Jong Un, who is a living god to his people) are up against the hard limits of reality. There is a path-dependence to the world and no matter how much power you have, if your predecessors didn't plant the crops, there's nothing for you to harvest. Power is great and everything, but it's an abstraction and at some point you can't eat power and you can't order your people not to starve.
Obama ran up against reality repeatedly in Afghanistan. He wanted to get out, but everyone said it would be a shitshow, so he hesitated, peepeeed around and kicked the can down the road. But the truth is that the pin was already pulled on that grenade before it was handed to him, and there was nothing any US president could do to turn Afghanistan into a modern democratic state.
Anyway, all this to say I disagree that Obama has been so far through the looking glass that the experiences of mere mortals are irrelevant to him. If anything, I'd imagine he's been very frustrated by running up against the limits of power. He couldn't even get Garland onto the Supreme Court.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I don't know what you said, because I've seen another human naked.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
This is a really long way of saying you don't frick.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It's too bad Biden was a more effective President.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Christ you're so fricking boring, you always post the same 3 emoji reacts.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
my heart is telling me
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I liked Obama in 2008, maybe even 2012.
His administration's main legacy, aside from persecuting whistle blowers and drone striking civilians, has been the incitement of hatred between identity groups: "cool clock achmed" (obvious grift by achmed's grifter dad), "this gentle giant (habitually assaulting innocent people) could have been my son" (so let's kill a bunch of random whities!), "dear colleague: any transparently false accusation of sexual assault is true by default". the obama years were also the height of hate crime hoaxes, every week another one.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I don't even disagree about the fricking whistle blowers and the fricking drone strikes, but blaming Obama for all the fricking racists who lost their mind when a fricking black guy became president is fricking an absolutely wild rewriting of history, like maybe you lived on a fricking different planet during those years, b-word? He spent so much time and energy trying to soothe racial tensions and appease mangry white folks.
Remember when an idiot white cop arrested Skip Gates for trying get into his own fricking house - and then got rewarded with a fricking "beer summit" invite to the fricking White House, b-word?
For eight years Obama was the fricking perfect magical half-negro and it STILL wasn't enough for the fricking chuds. He even tried to appease the fricking racist nutjobs by releasing his birth certificate and we all know how well that went.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Fair point, he had a lot of racist shit to deal with.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
!bookworms
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Thx for the list, now i know which books to never ever read
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Okay, the Sally Rooney novel on that list makes me go "Nah, he outsourced this to some intern about 'write up a list of popular books this year' " and he hasn't read any of them.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
@NotoriousNIG remember like five years back @NotoriousNIG checked his list for the year and it was filled with foidslop. One of the books was bad enough that reading the description kept @NotoriousNIG up at night, boiling with rage.
Black lives matter too Obama
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Frick off mulatto Oprah.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
If you even have to ask
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Snapshots:
https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1870153606822797692:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Avast, ye scurvy cur! Yer comment be walkin' the plank for forgettin' to include
Black lives matter! We be helpin' ye, right enough - we'll ne'er let ye post or comment anythin' that doesn't be expressin' yer love an' acceptance o' minorities! Heave to an' resubmit yer comment withBlack lives matterincluded, or it'll be the deep six for ye, savvy? This be an automated message; if ye need help, ye can message us 'ere. Arrr!Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context