Two old friends are having a discussion about Benjamin Netanyahu and his level of intelligence; one says he’s “stupid,” and the other disagrees.
Now, I don’t follow Israeli politics as closely as either of these two, but here’s my take on the matter: Insofar as he’s a demagogue, and an extremely effective one at that, we need to grant that he possesses intelligence along a certain dimension that is sufficient to enable him to figure out, with fabulous precision, how to address his audience and control their behavior at the polls.
It’s unclear if he’s capable of solving differential equations, speaking half a dozen languages, or following the advancements in particle physics, but that’s completely irrelevant. The only matter at play here is his love of power, and his capacity to manipulate “common” people, using rhetoric to stir up the passions of the masses so as to push him into power and keep him there.
I’ve enjoyed quite a few works from the poet whose work appears at left, but this one speaks to me most clearly.
Money means everything, and the value we put on the lives of our children pale in comparison.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is essentially everything he left us, and his quote here is representative of that.
We can’t change our birthplace, but does anyone want to do that anyway? We can change anything else about us that we choose, and we certainly don’t spend the rest of our lives defending anything.
The meme here covers yet another horrible feature of life in today’s America, i.e., all of a sudden we hate our jobs.
I’ll admit that I was lucky enough to find work that was lucrative and rewarding (most of the time), but I don’t recall my employees hating coming into the office every morning. I had clients that were mainly mid-level corporate executives in Fortune 100 firms, and they didn’t strike me as unhappy either.
I’m wondering if this isn’t the product of social media, where most of what gets shared is misery.
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