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deadpresidents · 5 months

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"[President] Biden's primary point of comparison wasn't really [Franklin D.] Roosevelt; it was [Barack] Obama. By the end of their Presidency, Biden was so in sync with his boss that the pair had what the journalist Jonathan Alter described as 'secret code.' When Obama tipped back his chair in meetings, Biden took that as a cue to ask provocative questions that Obama wanted answered but didn't want to raise himself for fear of shifting the tenor of a meeting. But Biden also chafed at the constraints of his job -- and if Obama sometimes rolled his eyes at him, he would roll his own right back. There was the tinge of class rivalry to their gibes. The lunch-pail cornball and the effete professor culturally chafing each other. Biden told a friend that Obama didn't know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower."

-- Franklin Foer, on the unique dynamic of the relationship between then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden during the Obama Administration, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), available now via Penguin Press.

#Presidents #Presidential Relationships #Presidential Friendships #Presidential Partnerships #History #Politics #Barack Obama #President Obama #Obama Administration #Vice Presidents #Presidency #Joe Biden #Vice President Biden #President Biden #Biden Administration #Franklin Foer #The Last Politician #The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future #Penguin Press

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quotesfrommyreading · 9 months

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Before the invasion, the railroad was hardly beloved. It was notorious for its corruption and unreliability. But in those first days of war, when nearly every institution collapsed, the trains miraculously kept running. By June, Ukrzaliznytsia had evacuated more than 3.8 million refugees, including 1 million children. Every day, the company hauled an estimated 300,000 tons of cargo, compensating for the Russian blockade of Black Sea ports and a fuel shortage that incapacitated trucking.

— Ukraine’s War Through Sergii Leshchenko’s Eyes

#franklin foer #ukraine’s war through sergii leshchenko’s eyes #current events #transport #railways #trains #refugees #russo-ukrainian war #2022 russian invasion of ukraine #ukraine #ukraine railways

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blackswaneuroparedux · 1 year

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Football (Soccer) isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.

- Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalisation

The printed illustrated sheet music cover for ‘The National Football Song’, words by L. Myers and music by C.A. Wills. It was published in London by J.A. Mills, ca.1880.

The song celebrates both Association Football and Rugby football and the cover depicts the national star players of the day.

The two types of ball are also illustrated, above and below the flags. Both soccer and rugby developed from the same game but there was such confusion between those who played it as a contact sport and those who didn't that in 1863 there was a meeting of representatives in London to clarify the fundamental rules. It was after this meeting that those who played rugby-style football went their own way, and the Football Association was founded for those who favoured a game that forbade tripping, shin- kicking, and carrying the ball.

In 1871 the Rugby Football Union was founded. One man illustrated here, A.J. Gould, who played for London before returning to his native Wales, is credited as having invented the idea of having four three-quarters in attack and defence.

#foer #franklin foer #quote #football #soccer #birth of the beautiful game #beautiful game #england #national song #anthem #society #culture #sports #world cup

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quotes-by-dilanka · 2 years

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We're being dinged, notified, and click-baited, which interrupts any sort of possibility for contemplation. To me, the destruction of contemplation is the existential threat to our humanity.

—Franklin Foer, World Without Mind

#franklin foer #world without mind #big tech #technology #social media

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tomorrowusa · 2 years

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Some recent news...

Biden says Sweden and Finland have the 'full backing' of the United States to join NATO

'Help is on the way': US Senate approves $40bn Ukraine package

In 2019, Trump betrayed Ukraine. It’s yet another reason why history will be harsh with him. Franklin Foer wrote then at The Atlantic...

Until the presidency of Donald Trump, the United States served as both Ukraine’s protector and its ethical conscience. In the years after the Iraq War, amid a global turn toward illiberalism, Ukraine was perhaps the place where American idealism burned brightest. Under the pressure of the State Department, and prodded by a restless and dissatisfied public, the Ukrainian government fitfully traveled in the democratic direction that Washington guided it in.

Donald Trump has gravely threatened this trajectory. Where American diplomats once attempted to inject morality into Ukrainian politics—and introduce the ideas of neutral governance and judicial impartiality—Trump polluted Ukraine with his own transactional politics. He dangled much-needed (and congressionally approved) military aid just out of reach, available only if the Ukrainian president abetted his plans to smear a political rival. He reinforced corrupt tendencies and practices that the United States had long tried to bury.

When Putin saw his puppet Trump booted from office, he panicked because he could no longer manipulate US foreign and defense policy. So after he got over the shock, he started planning his takeover of Ukraine. Like many narcissistic autocrats, Putin felt that democracies were inherently weak. Instead, Putin got his butt kicked with help the US and other NATO democracies gave to Ukraine.

The United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to do so as long as Trump Republicans are kept out of the White House.

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almondemotion · 1 month

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200 degrees, drizzle, and the Easter school run in the Republic of South Yorkshire

Monday morning, I’m on holiday. Such fun. Remember Miranda? Seems a long time ago. I guess it was In relative terms. Yesterday I heard an American journalist describe Binyamin Netanyahu as not the worst leader Israel has had, instead, the worst leader the Jewish people have had. In their history. That’s a long time. I don’t want to get into Israeli politics today although the topic is…

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#Franklin Foer #Haim #Israel #Middle East #Mindfulness

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garudabluffs · 2 months

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The recent rise of antisemitism in America

*A recent piece in The Atlantic by writer Franklin Foer argues that an era of American life is at an end—specifically, for American Jews.

How can we understand what is different about antisemitism happening in this moment, how widespread it is, and what to do to reduce it while still allowing for political disagreement?

Next week, we will continue this conversation with a show about the rise of Islamophobia in America, especially since the start of the war.

GUESTS

Franklin Foer

writer, The Atlantic

Lauren Holtzblatt

senior rabbi, Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C.

Rachel Fish

Special Advisor to initiative combating antisemitism at Brandeis University

LISTEN 46:16 https://the1a.org/segments/the-recent-rise-of-antisemitism-in-america/

*READ MORE https://web.archive.org/web/20240305130929/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/

"Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred."

"I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred."

"For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams."

"But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America."

"If America was a nation of immigrants, that made Jews quintessential Americans."

Listen to this article 1:15:49

The size of the U.S. Jewish population

This report classifies approximately 5.8 million adults (2.4% of all U.S. adults) as Jewish. This includes 4.2 million (1.7%) who identify as Jewish by religion and 1.5 million Jews of no religion (0.6%).17 https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/the-size-of-the-u-s-jewish-population/

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the current total population of Native Americans in the United States is 6.79 million, which is about 2.09% of the entire population. There are about 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the U.S.

#antisemitism #America #The Atlantic #Franklin Foer

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metamatar · 6 months

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since they're pivoting to a helpless biden narrative now

This is an extraordinary claim. The notion that the U.S. — which provides Israel with an automatic veto at the United Nations, intelligence support, Navy support in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, military presence in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, and tens of billions in cutting-edge weapons and military supplies — is “unable to exert significant influence” over Israel would, no doubt, come as a surprise to most political observers. So what evidence does the Post provide to support this claim? Entirely the say-so of Biden aides who decline to be named. [...]

Last month, in the early days of the war, Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant was pressed by critics about why the government agreed to allow in limited humanitarian aid to Gaza before the hostages had been returned. He said, “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?” [...]

In a recent book on Biden, The Last Politician, writer Franklin Foer details how Biden put an end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2021 with one phone call. After Netanyahu “struggled to justify his request [for more bombing] because he couldn’t point to fresh targets that needed striking,” Biden said, according to Foer, “Hey, man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.” And then, Foer continued, “like that, it was. By the time the call ended, Netanyahu reluctantly agreed to a cease-fire that the Egyptians would broker.”

#now that i actually live in the us i think i can us post #us politics

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soberscientistlife · 7 months

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According to a new book by Franklin Foer, Joe Biden isn't just the president of the United States, he is the West’s father figure, whom foreign leaders call for advice and look to for assurance.

Foer writes: "It was his calming presence and his strategic clarity that helped lead the alliance to such an aggressive stance, which stymied authoritarianism on its front lines. He was a man for his age.”

Yes, folks, President Biden is old. But he is also WISE and DECENT. Our allies see that and they value it.

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mitchipedia · 2 months

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The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending. Franklin Foer at The Atlantic with an in-depth report on the resurgence of anti-semitism on the right and the left.

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deadpresidents · 4 months

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DONALD TRUMP •The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Rage by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward's Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control by Steven Hassan (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

JOE BIDEN •The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama by Gabriel Debenedetti (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House by Chris Whipple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption by Jules Witcover (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

#History #Books #Book Suggestions #Book Recommendations #Presidents #Presidency #Presidential Books #POTUS Books #Books About Presidents #Barack Obama #President Obama #Donald Trump #President Trump #Joe Biden #President Biden

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quotesfrommyreading · 7 months

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Although the Ukrainian public largely believed that victory was within grasp, Leshchenko began to understand that the war likely would end not in months, but in years. If the Russians were going to treat the Ukrainians they conquered as vermin, then the occupation of Ukrainian territory was an intolerable concession. And if there weren’t any tolerable concessions to offer, were there any plausible grounds for a negotiated peace?

— Ukraine’s War Through Sergii Leshchenko’s Eyes

#franklin foer #ukraine’s war through sergii leshchenko’s eyes #current events #politics #russian politics #diplomacy #foreign relations #russo-ukrainian war #2022 russian invasion of ukraine #ukraine #russia #serhiy leshchenko

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gaypexredditor · 8 months

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. . . I wanted to flag something a bit more substantive that I took away from Foer’s tale: a mostly overlooked leitmotif that I think is essential to understanding Joe Biden, and particularly his decision to seek re-election at an age most Americans are expected to be working on their golf handicap.

That characteristic is what my British colleagues call “chippiness” — a working-class resentment of so-called Ivy League elites who not only tend to populate Washington’s corridors of power, but (in the view of Bidenworld) condescend to those who went to lesser schools or failed to start their DC climbs on the correct rungs of the achievement ladder: federal court clerkships, White House fellowships, Capitol Hill legislative gopherships. Whether the Ivy Leaguers do condescend in this way is not really the issue. Biden has always believed they do, and long borne a chip on his shoulder about eking out his start at the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School, where he barely made the cut after the bottom third of his first-year class was dropped from the programme.

No-one has provided a better window into that side of Biden than Richard Ben Cramer, the late Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote what is widely regarded as his generation’s greatest campaign book, What it Takes, about the 1988 presidential race. In one representative section, Cramer tells the story of Biden, then a newly elected Delaware senator, sitting in the backyard of a friend’s house in Wilmington, where a group of parents were discussing their children’s future:

Joe said: “Where’s your kid going to college?” One friend said: “Christ, Joe! He’s eight years old!” Another said: “Ahh, there’s a lot of good schools now.” “Lemme tell you something,” Joe said. And he wasn’t just shooting the shit. He had the clench in his jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country . . .” His buddies rolled their eyes, but Joe acted like he didn’t see. “Some people — most people — don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there." “Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge." “And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives — anywhere they want to go — always in the river of power." “And that river,” Joe said, “flows from the Ivy League.”

It is a chippiness that has marked Biden almost since he first arrived in Washington as a 30-year-old senator. Although he is now known for his regular malapropisms, the young Biden was then viewed — and often viewed himself — as a Kennedyesque “new generation” Democrat who rolled out soaring rhetoric and a common touch to connect with average voters. Unfortunately for Biden, that self-regard quickly labelled him a “showhorse” rather than a “workhorse”, in the Capitol’s overused shorthand.

It famously came crashing down in that 1988 race, when in an effort to shore up his working-class credentials, he appropriated the life story of former UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who had waxed poetic about being the first Kinnock in “a thousand generations” to go to university, after most of his ancestors worked in coal mines. No Biden, it turned out, worked in a coal mine.

But for me, the more telling incident from that campaign occurred months earlier, during the primary hustings in New Hampshire, when a potential voter — clad like something out of New England elitist central casting, in a beige jumper and wire-rimmed glasses — challenged Biden by asking: “What law school did you attend, and where did you place in that class?” Biden interrupted with a finger-jabbing tirade: “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” he growled, before ticking off a litany of dubious academic achievements — some of which, it turned out, were not actually true.

It was Biden at his chippiest, and when the video resurfaced amid the Kinnock scandal, it helped sink his candidacy. In the aftermath of the disastrous 1988 campaign, Biden cast aside his Kennedyesque tics and turned himself into the prototypical “workhorse”, eventually graduating to become one of the giants of the Senate. He took over as the top Democrat on the foreign affairs committee in 1997, and through the next decade became a respected voice on American diplomacy and international affairs.

The reason all this is newly relevant is because of more recent history. Biden was able to change perceptions among many in Washington in the 30 years following the 1988 campaign. But among the Ivy Leaguers to whom Bidenworld still felt condescended was Barack Obama — or at least Obama’s White House team. They fitted all of Biden’s elitist stereotypes and, Foer informs us, would regularly dismiss his views, including on foreign policy.

“Back in the last Democratic administration, the inner circle around Barack Obama undervalued [Biden’s team], as they did [their] boss, for lacking the qualities that the in-crowd prized,” Foer writes. Foer is unsparing. He writes that Larry Summers, Obama’s Harvard-educated Treasury secretary, was “an elite whose respect Biden craved”; that longtime aide Ron Klain — Harvard Law, Supreme Court clerk, Capitol Hill legislative director — was one of Biden’s “meritocratic trophies” that he liked to collect: “While Biden proudly touted the fact that he went to a state school, he took pride in the Ivy Leaguers, like Klain, on his rosters.” And then there was Obama himself:

There was the tinge of class rivalry to their gibes. The lunch-pail cornball and the effete professor culturally chafing each other. Biden told a friend that Obama didn’t even know how to say fuck you properly, with the right elongation of vowels and the necessary hardness of his consonants; it was how they must curse in the ivory tower.

That rivalry — that chippiness — is relevant today as the Democratic political class once again goes through what veteran operative Jim Messina calls their regular quadrennial “bedwetting” over whether their man is the right one to run in November. Speculation (or at least wishful thinking) that Biden will stand aside for a younger, more energetic candidate remains rife. Profiles of Gretchen Whitmer, the highly popular Democratic governor of Michigan, are passed around at lightning speed. Even Foer himself has added to the navel gazing, saying in a recent interview that it “wouldn’t be a total surprise” if Biden dropped out.

But anyone who knows of Biden’s very large chip, particularly when it comes to Obama, knows what is motivating him: he wants to show the world that Amtrak Joe of Scranton, Wilmington and Syracuse can have a presidency just as successful — if not more so — than constitutional law professor Obama, late of the University of Chicago and the Harvard Law Review. That would require eight years, not four. He won’t drop out, for the same reason that those who predicted he would not seek re-election were wrong.

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ebookporn · 1 year

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Why Jorge Luis Borges Hated Soccer: “Soccer is Popular Because Stupidity is Popular”

I will admit it: I’m one of those oft-maligned non-sports people who becomes a football (okay, soccer) enthusiast every four years, seduced by the colorful pageantry, cosmopolitan air, nostalgia for a game I played as a kid, and an embarrassingly sentimental pride in my home country’s team. I don’t lose all my critical faculties, but I can’t help but love the World Cup even while recognizing the corruption, deepening poverty and exploitation, and host of other serious sociopolitical issues surrounding it. And as an American, it’s simply much easier to put some distance between the sport itself and the jingoistic bigotry and violence—“sentimental hooliganism,” to use Franklin Foer’s phrase—that very often attend the game in various parts of the world.

In Argentina, as in many soccer-mad countries with deep social divides, gang violence is a routine part of futbol, part of what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges termed a horrible “idea of supremacy.” Borges found it impossible to separate the fan culture from the game itself, once declaring, “soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.” As Shaj Mathew writes in The New Republic, the author associated the mass mania of soccer fandom with the mass fervor of fascism or dogmatic nationalism. “Nationalism,” he wrote, “only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.” As Mathews points out, national soccer teams and stars do often become the tools of authoritarian regimes that “take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support [….] This is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.”