Aha, so he’s just talking about American involvement in wars then? No mention of Europe’s involvement.
Fighting wars is like punching someone in the face. It’s silly to say it’s never worth it. If someone’s already swinging fists in your direction then a counterstrike is pretty much the only thing that’ll work.
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Er - Memorial Day grew out of Decoration Day, which was the day southerners decorated the graves of Confederate dead.
No, Decoration Day, originally May 30, was indeed a Union holiday, But the secessionists have always claimed the credit.
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Thanks for this post. Mr. Altucher’s website is a store for pie-in-the-sky self-help books. It is very upsetting to see that he publishes personal information about his family, and then acts persecuted when they get upset about it. The fact is: he chose page views and popularity over his family. His sister is the injured party, not him. He lost all his friends due to this selfish behavior, but he’s happy to sell books telling people how to live their lives. Not happy to see him on boing boing at all.
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I like this piece. Especially the bits about laughter. Especially when we laugh at ourselves.
This typo appears in every Altucher post. He’s paying BB to run his stuff, which they’d never, ever run otherwise.
I should say, I don’t know that for an absolute fact, but I choose to believe it because I think there are enough people on BB’s staff who can recognize awful, awful writing when they see it. If I’m wrong, and BB really is publishing this because it wants to on its merits, and not because of any direct or indirect business relationship with Altucher, somebody just say so and I’ll correct myself.
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It is one thing to piss off people who don’t know you. It is another thing to cut off ties from close friends and family.
Either this guy has some despicable views and he’s sitting there all clueless “why me?” Or he is really bad at conveying his views and should consider another profession.
I have stuck my foot in my mouth a few times, but never to the point that some clarification and apologies couldn’t fix things among friends and family.
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Actually, it’s about ethics and looking at yourself in the mirror.
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Amen to that.
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I can’t imagine how it must feel to repeatedly piss off your loved ones and never feel it’s your fault.
I have social anxiety and can spend days ruminating over a tiny, irrelevant inflection or wording to my loved ones because I’m worried it might potentially be misunderstood as slightly terse or inappropriate. It’s overbearing and excessive, but I’m happy to suffer from that rather than being a completely blithe asshole to them.
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I don’t know why I care so much about what this guy has to say. I’ve got nothing against him, really. Never heard of him before and I’m not going to go googling to see what else he’s had to say. But he seems rather clueless. I’m imagining something like
Sister (warning #1): Please don’t write about xyz.
Sister (warning #2): I don’t like that you wrote about xyz, why’d you do that?
Sister (warning #3): Seriously? Again?
Sister: I’m done with you.
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Lot of self-contradiction going on here.
So by his own admission, the author doesn’t know enough about the topic to have formed a “real opinion” of it but still felt compelled to publish that opinion in the full knowledge that it was likely to anger and alienate people? Even though he “wanted to be loved?” Why?
Well, clearly not if the author’s friends and family haven’t spoken to him for years.
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Maybe “I wanted to be loved…” is a bit like “I’m not racist but…”, as in he wants to be loved but not quite enough to just STFU while he’s ahead.
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Another write up on that subject:
Yet Memorial Day’s original meanings and narratives are significantly different from, and would add a great deal of complexity and power to, how we see them nowadays. The holiday was first known as Decoration Day, and (per thorough histories by scholars like David Blight) was originated in 1865 by a group of freed slaves in Charleston, South Carolina. The slaves visited a cemetery for Union soldiers on May 1st of that year and decorated their graves, a quiet but very sincere tribute to what those soldiers have given and what it had meant to the lives of these freedmen and women.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-surprising-history-of-memorial-day
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You mean a trolley? So what we have here is a trolley that gets constantly counter-trolled?
I for one see the evil in all war but also find it really absurd to just be anti-war without suggesting another realistic way to resolve conflict. You can’t just let Hitler be or whatever. Similarly most people feel like they can’t just leave things said on the internet go without responding. The fire has been burning since the worlds been turning.
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“How do I handle people who have a bad opinion of me?”
Clearly introspection never crossed his mind.
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Right—otherwise the focus of the article would be “why do so many people have a bad opinion of me, and is that something I should try to change?”
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Why is this here?
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Is that true?
