Xinyu Tan > Recent Status Updates

...the bleak deserted plains of the lowlands questioned even the steady gaze of reason that attempted to penetrate them—this sadness, this twilight, this barrenness and desolation, could all be said to have found an equivalent in Estzer's drawing room with its desert-places, in the all-consuming rays emitted by the fixed dogma which united nausea, disillusion and the bed-bound routine,...

In place of it all there floated some purple mass, water weeds swayed in it and began moving off somewhere, and Pilate himself began moving with them. He was carried along now, smothered and burned, by the most terrible wrath—the wrath of impotence.

At this moment Hoover stood on the shore of a political and ideological Rubicon...Sometimes lumped together as Hoover's second program against the Depression, these measures would eventually help to revolutionize the American financial world. They would also lay the groundwork for a broader restructuring of government's role in many other sectors of American life, a restructuring known as the New Deal.

the Allies had once more than once offered to relax their demands on Germany, but only if their own obligations to the US could be forgiven...Iron-toothed insistence on full payment of the debts thus became not only a financial issue but a political and a psychological issue as well, a totem of disgust with corrupt Europe,...and of provincial America's determination to be suckered by silky international financiers.

One obvious way to relieve the pressure on the beleaguered Germans and Austrians was to break the chain by repudiating or suspending those obligations...Hoover was already exploring the idea on his own, but he reminded Lamont of its political explosiveness. "Sitting in New York, as you do, you have no idea what the sentiment of the country at large is on these inter-governmental debts."

The hugger-mugger of partisan politics continued to offend him. He remained a manager, not a politician. Perhaps the long adjournment of Congress even struck him as an opportunity to take charge of the antidepression battle without being pestered by nattering, grandstanding legislators. The virulence of Democratic antagonism, a sorely beset Hoover complained in his memoirs, "no man could measure or conciliate."

At this late date in March 1931, nearly a year and a half after the stock market crash, they still had no coherent analysis of what was happening and no agreed plan of action.

In the last analysis, Hoover's earliest responses to the economic crisis revealed as much about the boundaries of available intelligence and inherited institutions in Depression-era America as they did about the alleged narrowness of his beliefs.

Hoover himself appreciated these arguments [against the Hawley-Smoot Tariff] but possessed neither the political power to stop the congressional steamroller nor the political will to veto the final legislation...In this direct confrontation with a contrary-minded Congress, Hoover had failed the first great test of his capacity for political leadership.

Throughout the decade of 1920s, [Hoover] had promoted trade associations with the purpose of stabilizing prices, protecting employment, and rationalizing production in various industrial sectors, all through enlightened, voluntary cooperation among businessmen, with government's encouragement.

To a degree uncommon among presidents, Hoover was a reflective man of a scholarly bent, even something of a political philosopher. Ironically, the very care with which he had crafted his guiding principles, and the firmness of his commitment to them, would in time count his major liabilities as a leader. So would his habits of solitude, formed early in life and reinforced by cruel experience.

Massive military spending, with all its waste, represents a distinctly suboptimal deployment of capital for private gain...Ironically, it was this very inefficiency of the democratic welfare state as compared to a more unencumbered free-market system that made it successful—in the megapolitical conditions of industrialism.

[Hoover] meant to recruit the best brains in the country, he said, to compile a body of data and analysis about American society that would be more comprehensive, more searching, and more useful than anything ever before attempted. Their findings, he went on, would serve as "a basis for the formulation of large national policies looking to the next phase in the nation's development."

The Reconstruction amendments teach a hard lesson: the Constitution's superpower (it trumps the will of transient majorities) is also its Achilles' heel (it must withstand pressure from transient majorities). The law, even something as sturdy as constitutional law, is not enough to guarantee freedom. It is effective only if government officials have the courage to enforce it against a hostile citizenry.

After bitter debate and much negotiation, the delegates chose to count each slave as 3/5 of a person in a state's population total. It was not the only deal that the delegates made regarding slavery: to get South Carolina and Georgia to go along with greater congressional power to regulate commerce, state that would have preferred to immediately outlaw the importation of slaves agreed to permit it for 20 more years.

So, as middle class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And as this down-into-poverty domino effect happens, some parents are turning to drinking or drugs. Some are leaving their kids behind while they go looking for work out of town. Some are just unable to keep up the rent.

The triumph of the state as the principal vehicle for organizing violence in the world was not a matter of ideology. It was necessitated by the hidden logic of violence. It was...determined not so much by the wishes of theorists and statesmen, or even by the maneuvering of generals, as by the hidden leverage of violence, which moved history in the way that Archimedes once dreamt of moving the world.

Then Obama slowed the cadence. He laid out his agenda “to claim our dream and restore our prosperity.” Marv took in the candidate’s words: “I believe that, if our government is there to support you and give you the assistance you need to retool ana make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”

The ability to retain the child's view of the world, with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare—and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.

In fact, much of what anyone writes on any subject is autobiographical. There is a great deal of Plato in Republic, of Milton in Paradise Lost, of Goethe in Fast—though we may not be able to put our fingers on it exactly. If we are interested in humanity, we will tend, within reasonable limits, to read any book partly with an eye to discovering the character of its author.

A work of fine art is “fine” not because it is “refined” or “finished,” but because it is an end in itself. It does not move toward some result beyond itself. It is, as Emerson said of beauty, its own excuse for being.
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To read it well, all you have to do is experience it.

it feels like China's leadership is made up entirely of hydraulic engineers, who view the economy and society as liquid flows, as if all human activity—from mass production to reproduction—can be directed, restricted, increased, or blocked with the same ease as turning a series of valves.

The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that western conservatives would salivate over: administrating limited welfare, enacting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles…

The vial of cyanide had made him free. The others, his companions in suffering, had to walk to the end of their designated road; he had a choice. He could die at any minute of his choosing. He was free...It was a good life he was leading. He loved it. He wasn't even quite sure he would ever need his glass vial. Perhaps it was better to wait till the very last moment?