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
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Unironically Obama is a really smart, well-read guy.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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This is a really long way of saying you don't frick.
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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.
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I don't know what you said, because I've seen another human naked.
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It's too bad Biden was a more effective President.
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Christ you're so fricking boring, you always post the same 3 emoji reacts.
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my heart is telling me
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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.
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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.
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Fair point, he had a lot of racist shit to deal with.
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