I'm glad you made this comment, it really illustrates the thesis of the essay
Let's start with the line I find most telling:
>...a person who has written something they feel passionate about and that reflects their personal experience...what is the takeaway here?
The takeaway? You can't just read an essay and live through someone's qualia for a bit? No wonder writers are despairing.
At it's best, the author argues, writing is about:
>...mak[ing] something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other.
But nowadays everything has to be some kind of politicized appeal or self-help panacea for it to make sense (to you, Nelkins). On your substantive points about "unsupported hyperbole", I didn't see much hyperbole there, just a sad reflection on the work culture in this country and the sacrifices we all make to live the "American dream". It is not at all easy to support an arts career in this country, and it is getting more difficult every year. And that is lamentable. To wit:
>I have been to convenience stores where I see people working with untreated injuries, and when I leave, I get panhandled in the parking lot by someone in a chain-store uniform who is unable to afford the gas to get home on the last day before payday—someone with two jobs, three jobs. Until recently, I struggled to get by, and yet I am in the top twenty percent of earners in my country. I am currently saving up for dental implants—money I could as easily use for a down payment on a house. But I’m not entirely sure I’ll see the end of a mortgage or that any of us will.
I think he's right - there are clear decisions and policies that have created this dystopic state-of-affairs in this country. There was design, and there was intention, and this essay ends with a call to arms to save what may be as well as an elegy for what was.
>If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?
Thanks for the reply. This post has a decent number of votes, and made it onto the front page. Which surprised me, because I thought the essay was meandering and unconvincing, and ended with a bunch of platitudes. Am I allowed to not like every essay I read? I was curious to know why other people found it compelling. That's all. More power to all the people who want to write essays on issues they think are important.
Great post, it is difficult sometimes to remember that money and constant self-improvement are goals beaten into us that we sometimes mindlessly chase. I occasionally need to remind myself that every activity does not need to be moving me in the direction of some intangible goal, its ok to do something for no reason at all.
You can try and tax your way to culture shifts but since we aren't all Homo economicus it is often not as effective as directly appealing to morality and individual responsibility.
>He'd quite likely prefer that the FBI be legally allowed to torture suspects if extreme techniques were viewed as likely to result in useful information. To law enforcement, the rights of a suspect are a barrier to many convictions.
Not Comey. In this committee session he bluntly said torture is not effective and that his personal standard for what constitutes torture is more stringent than that in the statutes.
No he stated his moral position (that torture is wrong) first, and then at the end of his answer appended "and of course it is ineffective, but that is another story".
The problem here is, what if studies showed torture really did work? Would he have the same, up front moral position? I think that's what parent was trying to allude to. Not whether he is morally opposed to it right now but if he's more of a "if it works I'll use it no matter what" type of person.
But that just calls into question a person's character and it's going to be impossible to dig down and find a satisfying answer for everyone. So I'm not sure how fruitful this is.
>...if extreme techniques were viewed as likely to result in useful information
Right, he wouldn't use it because he doesn't believe it's effective. The GP is suggesting that if it were effective and legal, do you really believe he would refrain from doing it on moral grounds? It's the prerogative of the FBI to pursue cases using essentially all effective legal means, and it's no surprise to hear they are lobbying for more tools to become legal.
No. Like I said, he literally stated word for word that torture is both morally wrong in his eyes and ineffective, not to mention illegal.
Paraphrasing here but I think his definition was along the lines of "anything that purposefully causes physical harm or injury to a person", and when asked whether bad prison food counts, he said that in his eyes for his team that is not something he would condone. This was a pretty straightforward response; the man at least talks the good talk on torture.
Not to take away from his talking the good talk, but I don't think that his moral position is very meaningful given that it is demonstrably ineffective. If it was demonstrably effective and he said it was immoral, those words would carry much more weight. But he has little to lose by saying that it's morally wrong when it doesn't work. The illegality is also moot when discussing legalization.
Sure, but if the populace and the political climate demanded torture from the FBI and he refused, he would be fired and replaced with someone not so principled in their opposition.
You don't need the NSA to calculate that a couple million in donations (with added free publicity) is worth a shot at multi-billion-dollar public sector systems integration and analytics projects.
