(re-read)

This book was already chock-full of post-its, and I added a few more.

“[W]hat you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much… the universe absolutely could not care less.”

by Nellie Bowles

About the excesses of the progressives, from someone who was one. Extremely valuable, important, gripping, convincing, and depressing. The reviews are unfair. And I need to stop reading about cancel culture.

by Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott

Greg Lukianoff did a great job with Jonathan Haidt in THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, so let’s give him a shot with the analogous CANCELING. Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer who is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that defends free speech rights equally for all comers, “left” or “right.” And I do believe, as Haidt says in his forward, that he has “a big heart.” Unfortunately, the facts of today’s Cancel Culture mean he has to spend a lot more time documenting the abuses today by activists on the “left.”

Why do our young people behave like this? Nowadays, it seems everyone is a Nazi. Talk about your black & white thinking. Every speaker with any non-liberal affiliation has to be shouted down as if he were Hitler himself. I mean, if Hitler were invited to participate in a talk on your campus, would you protest in a respectful manner? Or would you shout, “My god, people this is HITLER!” That’s where we are. Since everyone is Hitler, there’s no responsible action to take other than screaming, disrupting, or preventing the event from ever taking place in the first place.

Here near my own home turf, at UVM, this year, the planned commencement speaker was canceled (literally). US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, protested for her vote against a Gaza cease-fire, was called by activists a “genocidal” “war criminal.”

She’s not a genocidal war criminal. She voted against a cease-fire in a complicated war. She’s not Hitler.

So it’s all come to this. Sometimes I think about the sweep of generations, each of us more self-centered and ‘coddled’ than the previous, and feel the inevitability of it all.

by Johann Hari

The idea is that depression and anxiety are over-medicalized, and that they should be solved culturally rather than with pills. His heart’s in the right place, but it seemed like the examples all involved people with quite obvious problems, and lo and behold, they felt better once they’d solved their problems. That’s not “depression.” That’s having a problem.

I bookmarked this for personal reasons:

“When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment…. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless – that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself that it’s your fault… If it’s your fault, then it’s under your control.”