"I just think it's a huge mistake for the world's wealthiest man... to be at, at, at this war with the world's most powerful man who I think is doing more to save the country than anybody — I mean, I'm 40 years old — anybody in my lifetime."

"You think about it, it's a guy who not even a year ago, nearly took a bullet in the process of campaigning, went back on the horse the next day. And if you look — obviously I'm biased — but you look at what we've done on the border, you look at what we've done with trade — fighting back against a generation of theft of the American dream, which is what the president's trade policies are starting to do. I just think you've got to have some respect for him and say, look, yeah, we don't have to agree on every issue I'm talking about. If you're Elon Musk, you don't have to agree with this on every issue. But is this war actually in the interest of the country? I don't think so."

Said JD Vance, talking to Theo Von. Audio and transcript here, at Podscribe. YouTube here.

Vance continues:

"You can read Ivanka’s inane musings below, but they’re not the real point. She turned 43 on October 30."

"There is no reason to post this thread on November 4, the night before Election Day, other than to emphasize that she’s not even thinking about Donald Trump’s reelection bid. Ivanka basically found a way to tell her dad, 'I really don’t care, do U?' via Twitter thread, rather than donning an ugly jacket...."

Writes Margaret Hartmann in New York Magazine, reacting to Ivanka's stoicism-studded thread on X.

What's up with Ivanka? Who knows? She was the favored child, it always seemed, or at least the favored daughter. Maybe you're wondering Should I care? Just consult Marcus Aurelius — "You have power over your mind—not outside events" — or Epictetus — "Anyone capable of angering you becomes your master."

"I’ve been reading a lot of Marcus Aurelius’s 'Meditations' book... And the funny thing about that book is..."

"... he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this book.... I really have adopted the Marcus Aurelius philosophy, which is that everything I’ve done means nothing. I don’t think for a second that it will ever mean anything to anyone ten days after I’m dead...."

Says Jerry Seinfeld, interviewed by David Remnick, in "The Scholar of Comedy/Jerry Seinfeld on how to write jokes, the ending of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' and the world-historical struggle to invent the Pop-Tart" (The New Yorker).

That movie about inventing the Pop-Tart was not sponsored by the company that makes Pop-Tarts, so it's not like the Barbie movie. I was glad to see that, so let me show you the trailer:

Nice effort at setting things in 1963 — including a scene in the Oval Office with JFK — so why use the David Bowie recording of "Rebel, Rebel," which came out in 1974? Is everything on the top 100 for 1963 not Pop-Tarty enough? Couldn't get the rights for "My Boyfriend's Back" or "Walk Like a Man" or "Easier Said Than Done" or "Da Doo Ron Ron"?

"If you’re faced with all these challenges, you have to remain calm. What’s the point of worrying about something..."

"... worrying is not going to make your problems disappear. I attribute this to my father and grandfather. They are very very stoic."

Said Daniel Penny, quoted in "Daniel Penny, charged in Jordan Neely death, breaks silence: 'I am not a white supremacist'" (NY Post).

Asked about something Al Sharpton said about him, Penny said he wasn't sure who Al Sharpton was: "I don’t really know celebrities that well."

Celebrities.

And he doesn't know what's going on in social media: "I don’t follow anyone, and I don’t have social media because I really don’t like the attention and I just think there are better ways to spend your time. I don’t like the limelight."

"Modern American culture has a way of transforming nearly every philosophical and spiritual tradition... into an anodyne pop-culture analogue."

"But contemporary iterations of Stoicism... may win the prize for reducing complex ideas to shallow, if marketable, sound bites.... At its best, Stoicism challenges us to tame our selfish passions and trains us to accept injustice, failure and death. Contemporary pop-Stoicism, however, treats this idea of self-control as... a useful 'life hack': individualistic, capitalist-friendly self-help... For [writers such as Jordan Peterson], Stoicism can often be boiled down to therapeutic platitudes: work hard, push through pain, reframe toxic narratives. But pop-Stoicism doesn’t ask one of philosophy’s most important questions: What does it mean to live a good life?... [G]oodness, unlike productivity, is something we can’t 'hack' our way toward achieving."

Writes Tara Isabella Burton under the heading "Stoicism" in a collection of short essays, "Spring Cleaning 2022," at WaPo. She's the writer of novels and also the nonfiction works "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World" and "Self-Made: Curating Our Image From da Vinci to the Kardashians."

The "Spring Cleaning" title refers to the prompt given to the various writers — "what all of us should toss."

I don't think Burton has established a reason to throw out Stoicism. Ironically, she wants people not to use this philosophy in a shallow way, but her rejection of today's efforts at Stoicism seems shallow too. She's certainly capsulized Jordan Peterson in an aggressively pat way.

Gad Saad talks with Joe Rogan about Marcus Aurelius.

ADDED: Joe takes a druggy off-ramp midway through.

I'm back from my stoical walk — 3.4 miles, 60°, down by the lake and over to State Street...

 

... graffiti on a boarded up window says "Marxists are trying to make State Street a boarded-up unsafe dystopia."

  

Sunshine Daydream says "Spread love not hate."

***

... walking in the tall trees/going where the wind goes/blooming like a red rose...

"Don’t set your mind on things you don’t possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think how much you would desire them..."

"... if they weren’t already yours. But watch yourself, that you don’t value these things to the point of being troubled if you should lose them." 

Wrote Marcus Aurelius, quoted in "The Daily Stoic," an audiobook accompanying me as I take a walk — away from all TV sets and computers. 

We're having a frabjous Indian Summer right now here in Wisconsin, USA.

"Twitter founder and CEO and billionaire Jack Dorsey... says he eats only one meal a day in the week and doesn't let any foodstuff pass his lips at the weekend."

"He also starts every day with an ice bath. 'Nothing has given me more mental confidence than being able to go straight from room temperature into the cold,' he says. And, rain or shine, he walks the five miles from his home to his office.... Dorsey's wellness-hacking habits are extrapolated from the ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of Stoicism.... [Dorsey has] created a platform that has allowed populists, alt-right types, and Russian bots to spread their messages to vast new audiences.... Twitter undeniably helped make Donald Trump president and gave Britain's Brexiteers a stage.... Dorsey has experienced how easy it is to create global pandemonium with a laptop and a smidgen of chutzpah. So for the Twitter CEO and his kind, trying to control biology with low-grade torture, plus a disinterest in traditional rich-people trappings, may be a kind of self-imposed penance for having built platforms and technology that have unleashed some pretty bad things on the world...."

From "Why are Silicon Valley billionaires starving themselves?" by Susan Margolis in The Week.

I don't believe there's any true penance here other than a desire for good PR (in that it makes him look serious, hard-working, and lofty — almost saintly). But I don't believe he's doing these things because he thinks he's done wrong — only that he wants to defend his company's reputation and freedom from regulation. I would guess that he's genuinely motivated by the desire for good health and long life and fascinated by extreme and challenging ideas about how to get that. Some people are drawn to stringent routines, and there's a sort of magical thinking about rituals.

And I don't think the philosophy of the Stoics had to do with penance. It's not about the sense that you've done something wrong and need to make up for it.

"What I was surprised to find was the extent to which [the 'manosphere' is] using ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity."

Said Donna Zuckerberg, interviewed in "Donna Zuckerberg: ‘Social media has elevated misogyny to new levels of violence’/When the academic, sister of Mark Zuckerberg, began exploring online antifeminism, she discovered far-right men’s groups were using classical antiquity to support their views" (The Guardian). She's an "academic" in the sense that she has a PhD (in classics). Her job is editing an on-line scholarly journal.

[I]n the case of stoicism’s sudden revival, Zuckerberg found that an active corner of Reddit was applying Hellenistic philosophy to explain the pain and hardship white western men were suffering in the 21st century. Except these men didn’t consider themselves angry – they considered themselves oppressed....

In her book [Not All Dead White Men] Zuckerberg explains that political and social movements have “long appropriated the history, literature and myth of the ancient world to their advantage....

Zuckerberg digs deep through the most popular and excruciating message boards, blogs and threads – so that, I joke, we don’t have to.... Her research, on which she set herself a limit of an hour a day, led her to essays advocating rape, posts offering advice on how to dehumanise, trick and control women, and reflections on the case against female education. “Sure, it was upsetting,” she admits. “I made a rule that if something really got to me, I’d stop right there for the day.”...

Okay, guys, be excruciating. I'll stop right here for the nonce.

ADDED: The nonce is over. I just had to come back to say I'm reading "The Zuckerbergs of Dobbs Ferry" (New York Magazine)(linked in the Guardian article) and I've learned that Donna & Mark's mother was a psychiatrist and their father was a dentist, and:

For many years, Ed commuted daily between Brooklyn, where he kept an office, and Westchester, where his family was steadily growing: Randi arrived in 1982 and Mark in 1984. In 1987, the year his daughter Donna was born, contractors completed work on the renovation of the ground floor of the house, and Zuckerberg moved his practice full time to Dobbs Ferry....

Karen, now a licensed psychiatrist, was enlisted as his office manager—“my most overqualified employee,” Ed says. A few years later, Karen briefly attempted to return to psychiatry but returned home after a year. “She saw those people in the chair,” Ed recalls, “and she didn’t want her kids to turn out to be one of them.”

Your mother is a psychiatrist, and after you were born, she switched to being the office manager for your father the dentist, and the whole operation is home-based. She tries to get back to her profession, but can't, because of the superior importance of you, your siblings, and your father's career as a dentist. Drill down into that. What does it mean? Who knows! The psychiatrist gave up.

Leveraging Hillary's illness into a feminist meme with the phrase "powering through."

Just think those words — powering through! — and the bad becomes good. The memo went out. You can transform the awful images and stories into exactly what Hillary needs to win: A convincing presentation of herself as a feminist heroine.

I can't link to all the stories and video processing Hillary's bad-health news with the phrase "powering through." I wish I had a video montage of the use of the word in the last day or so. It would be funny. But I don't...



... and I just want to cherry-pick 3 that show the feminist-heroine move. (The 3rd one is critical of the move.)

1. In Salon, by Mary Elizabeth Williams: "Hillary powers through pneumonia — because that’s what women do/Why is it surprising that the presidential candidate kept working even while ill? Women do it every day."

We fear being viewed as weak, so we hustle through the job, hiding or downplaying our diagnoses and hoping nobody notices. Can you blame the Clinton campaign, which has been under absurd scrutiny for every head turn, every cough, for initially keeping Hillary’s illness quiet? Could the Clinton team not know that if you’re looking for an argument that someone is unfit for a job, having a treatable and temporary illness sure seems more credible than “is actually an ignorant, incompetent bigot but at least has a penis,” right? 

Yet Hillary’s stamina, as anyone who’s watched her over the past few decades should know, is a force to be reckoned with. And as writer Liz Meriwether pointed out Sunday, “If anything, the fact that she was campaigning with pneumonia proves that she’s tough as balls.”

2. In Bustle, by Elizabeth Strassner: "If Hillary Clinton's Working While Sick Is A Scandal, All Women Are Guilty."

I was surprised by the extent of the Clinton pneumonia coverage, in large part because I believed that other news stories this weekend were more important, but also because few people seemed to focus on the aspect of the story that was most interesting to me: namely, that Clinton powered through many campaign events despite an unpleasant illness....

Canadian politician and feminist Charlotte Whitton was famous for saying, "Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good." Clinton is simply the most recent and, perhaps, most famous of women who must actively work to rebuke the prejudice that they are somehow weaker than their male counterparts....

The days after Clinton's diagnosis when she continued to work are emblematic of a larger tradition of women feeling that they must work more than men in order to prove their equality. Trump himself has acknowledged this: He has said he hires women because their work ethic indicates that "there was something that they want to really prove." It is unsurprising, then, that many women do feel they must work overtime, either to correct the many insidious stereotypes about women in the workplace or to fit in the many household and child care tasks for which American women, compared to their husbands, are still disproportionately responsible.

3. Karol Markowicz in the New York Post: "Hillary apologists’ response to collapse is demeaning to women."

[W]hen unable to deny that Hillary had been seriously sick and pretending otherwise, the narrative became how she was emblematic of women powering through and getting the job done even when risking a lung collapse. Like a bad sitcom where the wife is always right and the husband is a lovable doofus, Hillary’s surrogates insisted that soldiering on in the face of contagious infections is just something that women do.

Emily Hauser, a columnist at The Week, tweeted, “So what I’m hearing is that Clinton got really sick & soldiered on anyway, & most people didn’t even notice b/c that’s what women do.” Actor Patton Oswalt seconded that, and tweeted: “Wait, so Hillary has PNEUMONIA and she’s still campaigning as hard as she is? You realize how badass that is, right?”

Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm joined in, tweeting that “’powering through’ illness is what women do: Stoically, every. single. Day.” as if Hillary was battling the sniffles....

Was it stoicism or an unstoppable hunger for power that drove Hillary to get ill enough to collapse at an event and have to be carried away? It’s not just women we’d criticize for taking risks with their own health, and the health of those around them. But Hillary always has her fallback excuse: Stop being mean to me, I’m a woman.

"Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control."

"One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus."

The most interesting paragraph to me in an article in The Atlantic that's getting a lot of attention, "The Coddling of the American Mind" (subtitle: "In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health."), by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

If you've already been reading and thinking about this article, I wonder if you noticed the Buddhism-Stoicism-Hinduism angle and the "cognitive behavioral therapy." This isn't the usual stuff of American free speech and political debate. It's strangely aligned with the "coddling" that's supposed to be bad, because it circles around inner peace, not getting shaken up and challenged and activated.