491–500 of 673 posts
RIP Henry Kissinger. I am as far apart on the political spectrum from Kissinger as can be imagined, but it is useless to imagine a counterfactual, somehow better, history where he did not make his mark. We often think powerful people have the power to command the course of history, and therefore is somehow more culpable than the cheering onlooker. But we are all vessels on the tides of history. Applying criminal law…
Kissinger's book "Diplomacy”(1994) is incredibly good and well-written Must read for anyone interested in international politics. To understand Kissinger, you must understand his worldview. He had an acute sense of tragedy, and understanding that things can go wrong in an instant. For him the job of foreign policy was very modest: to keep the most horrible disasters away by using power against power. By preventing th…
I am reminded of Hunter S Thompsons euology for Nixon. Good Riddance! Should have died in jail. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...
Wow. What a refreshing directness: > He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin. How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?
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That's very common. Basically all elderly people of note have obituaries written by reporters on staff so that an article can be gotten out quickly if the subject dies suddenly. Not uncommonly, the targets of the obituary are of a higher class and have better medical treatment and so live beyond their obituary writer.
Just curious. Was Kissinger a smoker? And was he an Ashkenazi Jew? Because he'd have risk factors from smoking, and would also be likely to have some known genetic predisposition to certain illnesses.
From the obituary in the New York Times: "Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent and editor for The Times who died in 2010, contributed reporting." So, Kissinger outlived the guy who wrote his obituary!
Out of curiosity I asked ChatGpt 4 to write an obituary for him and it refused as it would insensitive or disrespectful. I told it he had passed away, it checked the internet and wrote the obituary. The power of ChatGPT continues to amaze me.
Are you sure it didn't just "believe" what you told it, the same way LLMs can be badgered into falsehoods?
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Henry is such a strange name for a child. It just doesn't make sense to me. Henry is like an adult name :/
How about this one then, my grandmother is named Lillemor which is Swedish for "little mother". It was a fairly common name even. People out there naming their kids "little mother".
Do yourself a favor and listen to at least one of the six part series that Behind The Bastards podcast[0] did on Kissinger. It will give you a background, with sources, on the "controversial" statesman that you'll read eulogies about over the next few days. [0] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-kissinger [1] https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-two-kissinger [2] https://omny.fm/shows/behind…
Haven't listened to the podcast (yet) and don't know much about kissinger but the description "the Forest Gump of war crimes" made me laugh out loud, whether or not it's accurate.
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What "nuance and unbiased conversation". Forgive me for not giving an inch to someone who watched as millions were murdered by bombs. A factual retelling of the man's "achievements" should make any sane person cringe with disbelief that he lived to be a hundred and wasn't jailed. There's a time and place for multiple viewpoints and this is not it. Sometimes "the other side" really has no place
This leads to a dangerous path. If you are not willing to engage with or understand the other side of the debate you will have no capacity to understand or debate the modern day Kissingers who are currently in government.
Nuance and unbiased conversation would actually allowed for conclusion that someone could do a lot more harm then good. If you insist that powerful people needs to be always talked about in good terms and discussion of bad stuff needs to contain "balancing" good stuff, you are neither unbiased nor nuanced.