Convenience Big Store: Selfish Obama is ruining his legacy 🥳🦠

12 August, 2021

In the headlines

GCSE grades have reached a record high for the second year running after exams were replaced by teacher assessment. Today's results saw top marks rise by 2.7% to 28.9%. The Taliban are just 80 miles from the Afghan capital, Kabul, after Ghazni fell yesterday – the 10th city to be captured in less than a week. A power-sharing deal with the insurgents is on the table, a government source tells Al Jazeera. The smiley-face emoji is perceived by Gen Z as "patronising or passive-aggressive". The Daily Star asks, how do "bedwetters" survive in this cruel world?

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Selfish Obama is ruining his legacy

Last weekend Barack Obama threw himself a "ginormous" 60th birthday party, says Liza Featherstone in Jacobin. The bash was starry – 475 people were invited, including George Clooney and Beyoncé. It was also, given the recent Covid surge, completely tone deaf. As Obama did party prep, the Delta variant was ravaging America. The White House urged citizens to be cautious – so Obama slimmed down his guest list to 200. Needless to say, "the optics of this shindig were not good".

But it's no surprise. Obama's post-presidential career has been "strikingly bereft of public-spiritedness". For charity work, he built a museum to honour himself, the Obama Presidential Center, which manages to be garish and damaging, taking up "cherished green space" in Chicago. His property portfolio is just as controversial. Not content with an $11.75m mansion in Martha's Vineyard and an $8.1m pad in DC, he's developing an "ecological monstrosity in Hawaii". The planned beach house has a sea wall to protect it from storms. Handy, but illegal, because it disrupts the flow of the ocean. Most ex-presidents are more modest. Carter defended democracy in Venezuela, George HW Bush raised money for Hurricane Katrina and George W Bush became "an amateur painter". Meanwhile, Obama is cruising around the British Virgin Islands with Richard Branson. But somehow he's the one who enjoys a liberal "cult of hero worship".

Being a snowflake is bad for you

"Being a snowflake is bad for your mental health," says Dennis Relojo-Howell in The Critic. Psychologists like me are troubled by the "overzealous focus on protecting people from all trauma, whatever the cost". Take universities, where "speech" and "discourse" are now scrupulously screened for offense. The social justice movement has turned university campuses into places where students can go to avoid hearing things that they do not like, "instead of places where they can learn about different perspectives and how to think critically".

As noble as this is, it's not helpful. What you get is safetyism, an environment in which emotional discomfort is equated with physical danger, and no danger is acceptable. In theory this leads to what essayist Nassim Taleb calls antifragility, "which refers to the fact that many systems – including our immune system and psychological system – need to experience stressors to grow strong". Instead of helping young people, we are "empowering their anxiety". This can stunt the natural coping responses individuals need to develop. In practice, the results are clear. The number of Americans who reported feeling symptoms of "serious psychological distress" trebled between 2018 and 2020. It's a similar story in Britain. Enlightened causes such as critical race theory make people become hostile to "oppressors" and hate themselves. "When you overprotect people from risks, you're not doing them any favours."

On the way back

Animal testing, which could be used for cosmetics in the UK for the first time since 1998, says The Guardian. The Home Office told charity Cruelty Free International the government had "reconsidered its policy" and was aligning with a European Chemical Agency decision that some cosmetic ingredients must be tested on animals for safety reasons.

Gone viral

A picture of a goose flying upside down has caused a stir on Instagram. The Dutch photographer thought it didn't know how to fly because of the wind, but it turns out the bird was just showing off in front of friends. It's known as whiffling, an expert told news website WGME. "Once young geese have mastered flying, they start to see what is possible and how far they can go. They do it to brag to their peers. Like, look at me!"

Zeitgeist

The + sign is everywhere these days, says Eric Schwartau in Gawker. It got tacked on to LGBT in 2017 as a "catch-all inclusivity signifier" and now helps "behemoth media conglomerates" rebrand as subscription streaming services: Disney+, Apple TV+, CNN+ and so on. But something doesn't add up. These streamers offer us "adaptations, reboots and remakes" – less, not more. The + is an "identity void" for both sexuality and entertainment. "In our haste to include everything, we may end up with nothing."

Snapshot

Noted

GCSE results suggest girls are "cleverer" than boys, says education expert Professor Alan Smithers in The Times. A third of the exams taken by girls this year were awarded at least a grade 7, equivalent to an A, compared with a quarter taken by boys. This reflects a trend first seen in the 1980s.

Snapshot answer

It's a 121-year-old box of chocolates, sent by Queen Victoria as a Christmas treat to troops fighting in the Boer War. The tin boxes containing six chocolates were so sought-after that offers of £20 were floated by fellow soldiers hungry for more, despite privates earning only one shilling a day. Made for threepence a box in 1900, these chocolates are set to make a profit when they're sold at auction on Monday by Hansons. A similar box went for £125 in 2018.