Mastodawn

"Afterwards he wrote the song It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier, about strange and disturbing army folk: “Now Fred’s an intellectual, brings a book to every meal. / He likes the deep philosophers, like Norman Vincent Peale.” Peale was a famous evangelical Christian of even more than usual banality and intolerance, and also the Trump family pastor, who gave the US president his ethical base."

It's interesting that Lehrer chose the name "Fred" when he targeted Norman Vincent Peale since NVP was the asshole who helped create the asshole we now know as trump. I'd never read about NVP but JEEZE is he ever an influencer in the worst possible way.

Tom Lehrer obituary

Singer, songwriter and satirist who eschewed the limelight to return to teaching mathematics

The Guardian

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Nazani

@mycotropic Oldster here, NVP was respected by lots of middle-class folk. Prelude to the psycho-rubbish we saw on Oprah's show.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/894967922/norman-vincent-peale-was-a-conservative-hero-known-well-beyond-his-era

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Mycotropic 11h ago

@Nazani

Thanks for that, and it explains a lot, well infusing NVP with Roy Cohn anyway!

For the positivity stuff though, the silly people promoting the #PositivePsychology #PositivityRatio stuff annoy me as a scientist. There's an amazing statistics paper showing that the math used to justify the calculation is simply wrong and yet they still publish on it. It's wrong, do something else.

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Nazani 10h ago

@mycotropic This topic was on my mind because I heard an interview on NPR recently about how "vision boards," "manifesting," and other types of positivity practices can make goals harder to achieve. People may be less honest with themselves about the real-world actions they need to take.