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Personal Invitations and “Doing Things That Don't Scale” There's great power in a personal invitation. When you personally invite someone to your community, it lets the person know that they were personally considered and approved. It makes them feel special and creates an understanding of intimacy and quality.
The Business of Belonging
David Spinks
As soon as I started the story I knew I shouldn’t tell it. It was the story about Captain Kale wanting to bring the Chinook into the middle of the hooches, and me letting him do it. I couldn’t find the right tone. My first instinct was to make it somber and regretful, to show how much more compassionate I was than the person who had done this thing, how far I had evolved in wisdom since then, but it came off sounding phony. I shifted to a clinical, deadpan exposition. This proved even less convincing than the first pose, which at least acknowledged that the narrator had a stake in his narrative. The neutral tone was a lie, also a bore. How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told. But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you were now that you’ve escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was? And how can you honestly avoid judging him? But isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it? And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart? And in the end who gives a damn, who’s listening? What do you owe the listener, and which listener do you owe?
In Pharaoh's Army
Tobias Wolff
Many mocked him for that question, though it seems a fair one. Many others shuddered at the implication that Donald Trump, presiding over a trillion-dollar makeover of our entire nuclear arsenal that he inherited as a program from Barack Obama, might feel that he could actually use some of these weapons. But of course he planned to use them, as he had clearly implied to Chris Matthews. He wants to use them like every other president: in “negotiation,” in threats, in exploiting uncertainty in our opponents as to whether he might launch “a nuke” in a stalemated armed conflict or a crisis, or perhaps in pique at what he experienced as humiliating provocation. Whether he would carry out such threats in any given circumstances, or otherwise use them in attacks, remains as uncertain, and as possible, as it has been for every other president in the nuclear era. Trump hinted strongly to Matthews, and he even came close to saying outright—“I’m not going to use nuclear, but I’m not taking any cards off the table”—that he would be bluffing. Most, if not all, of the time. Nevertheless, the last bargaining strategy mentioned above,312† advertising and exploiting his own unpredictability, deliberately creating uncertainty in an adversary by demonstrating impulsive, erratic, vindictive behavior—reminiscent, to many observers, of Nixon’s madman theory313—is especially worrisome to many in America and elsewhere because of a growing sense that this particular president actually may be mad. There’s ample evidence supporting that impression. Still, in some ways he has shown himself to be crazy like a fox, or he would not be president. He may yet elude his domestic pursuers and survive in office, and we and our democracy might survive that too. Or not. Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
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