“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. … When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say ‘Heil’ to him, nor will they call him ‘Führer’ or ‘Duce.’ But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'” (1935)
— Dorothy Thompson, first American journalist thrown out of Germany in 1934 for criticizing Hitler
Another Dorothy Thompson quote:
“Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.”
Celebrate the unconventionally courageous and kind.
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Coolness. What is it and what are its characteristics?
What is Cool?
In spite of the ambiguity, it seems that we remain capable of distinguishing cool attitudes from uncool ones. So what is cool? Let me say that cool resists linear structures. Thus a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not. Both moralists and totally immoral people are uncool, while people who maintain moral standards in straightforwardly immoral environments are most likely to be cool. A CEO is not cool, unless he is a reasonable risk-taker and refrains from pursuing success in a predictable fashion. Coolness is a nonconformist balance that manages to square circles and to personify paradoxes. This has been well known since at least the time of cool jazz. This paradoxical nature has much to do with cool’s origins being the fusion of submission and subversion.
A president is uncool if he clings to absolute power, but becomes cooler as soon as he voluntarily concedes power in order to maintain democratic values. This does not mean that the cool person needs to be an idealist. On the contrary, very few of the coolest rappers are idealists. Idealism can be extremely uncool, as shown by the self-righteous examples of both neoDarwinists and creationists. Cool is a balance created by the cool person’s style, not through straightforward rules or imposed standards. Coolness implies the power of abstraction without becoming overly abstract. Similarly, the cool person stays close to real life without getting absorbed by it. Going with the masses is as uncool as being overly eccentric. It is not cool to take everything, nor is it cool to give everything away: it seems rather that the master of cool handles the give and take of life as if it were a game. The notion of ‘play’ is important to cool, because in games power gets fractured and becomes less serious, which enables the player to develop a certain detached style while playing. For the cool, this detached style matters more than the pursuit of money, power and ideals.
The good thing about being cool is that most cool people are not born that way. It can be nurtured.
Right now, Bernie, Donna and Liz are not cool. Trump has never been cool. Anyone whoever voted for Trump is viciously anti-cool.
The regulars on this site? Very cool.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Haha, before I saw your last line in the post, RD I was going to say this post and you are cool! So I say it here and now, :).
“… while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good …”
This is uncanny. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riots said something very similar on Lawrence’s show The Last Word on Friday. He asked her how she goes about life as she protests Putin. She said you have to find joy in what you are doing, even if it is about protesting.
They sure as shit ain’t making it easy.
Atrios has the first line of Remember Remember up. So I’ll finish it.
Remember, Remember the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I see no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Breaking news on MSNBC now: Mueller has enough to charge Flynn. I think this is coming this week.
Who will buy DB’s book? Bernie people? But she threw him under the bus saying she would have replaced Hillary with Biden, not Bernie. Biden people? But she is sucking up to Bernie saying DNC ‘rigged’ it. O’Malley people? There are no O’Malley people, but may be O’Malley will buy it.
How about the Media? Yes, to prop her up because of their own Hillary hate.
How about the Russians? YES! and they will pay rubles for it so they can play their part in ruining this country.
But we are in a dangerous and vicious news cycle. I just heard her briefly on CNN digging her heals in. She will do that more and more as she is confronted and maybe invent and exaggerate things even more because she is now attacked. Media people are only happy to fan the flames and pour fuel over fire. Who is going to get burnt in this scenario? Yeah, we know.
Omg, did you see the Donna Brazile book hashtag yesterday?? Cringeworthy funny.
Yes, I did. Hilarious.
Now Pelosi is saying Dem. Primary 2016 was almost a waste of time. That was because there was no better candidate than Hillary for that job (as was in 2008). Instead of that posture, Pelosi and others behaved like they were plagued with guilty conscience. Because they knew 2008 primary was a daylight robbery. When you screw up the natural order of things, you may resort to unnatural posture to bring back order. They added their own baggage to the race. Again, all of this has a tinge of Hillary being a woman. I don’t remember the loss being analyzed to this extent with any of the previous men who lost especially when they didn’t have to deal with the Russians and a buffoon like Hillary had to.
Great comment through and through…
It needs to be rehashed over and over, cause “we don’t forget”.
Thank you, thank you dear RD. But I’ve always felt that cool was one of the more overrated assets. The most underrated? Earnestness.
I thought earnestness or other similar attribute was at the heart of turning what is uncool to cool, from that excerpt.
Food for thought and whatever the recipe it must be leavened by humor.
This is a good guy.
That first quote, how timely. How perfect.
RD, can you tell me when people first started saying Yinzer as in Yinzer accent?
Hey Ricco, make mine a Moscow Mule.