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If giving money to a politician prejudiced my ability to think and write honestly, I wouldn't do it. Fortunately, it doesn't.
George Packer -
I've been interested in American politics since I was eight. That was in 1968. It was an interesting year. I was a huge Eugene McCarthy supporter, so I guess he was the first senator I really knew about and cared about.
George Packer
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Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.
George Packer -
Every movement, to stay alive - a very difficult thing to do historically - has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going.
George Packer -
The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility.
George Packer -
Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments - who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.
George Packer -
Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.
George Packer -
What I found in Silicon Valley is an industry that's sort of been kept a very far remove from Washington and had an attitude of 'Just let us do our thing and make the miracles that people love around the world and leave us alone.'
George Packer
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WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a cell of activists that is releasing information designed to embarrass people in power.
George Packer -
Ambition, of course, is the politician's currency.
George Packer -
The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.
George Packer -
Climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.
George Packer -
The Iraq war was always a long shot. But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles, and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought.
George Packer -
Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism - money, eyeballs, software, brands.
George Packer
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The similarities are limited but real. They amount to a shared disgust with politics as usual in America. The Tea Party focuses on the federal government; Occupy Wall Street focuses on corporate America and its influence over the government.
George Packer -
Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focused on the threat of terrorism, Putin's domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda.
George Packer -
So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where writing was considered the worthiest thing you could try to do.
George Packer -
The phrase 'change the world' is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of 'early-stage investing' and 'beta tests.'
George Packer -
A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.
George Packer -
That's why I'm not on Twitter and don't have an iPhone. It's not because I'm superior to it: it's because I would be a slave to it, and I don't want that to happen.
George Packer
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In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.
George Packer -
Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.
George Packer -
Al Qaeda asks its recruits to establish their bona fides as a condition of membership, even requiring answers to a long questionnaire. But ISIS has democratized and globalized jihad by lowering the entry bar to an eve-of-destruction YouTube pledge of allegiance to the caliphate - and even that could probably be waived.
George Packer -
If you've ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive, chances are that you've dressed an African.
George Packer