2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17385586
2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10073663
2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453300
2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568945
2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110779
2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1195641
and one larger one:
Date/#comments
Software could certainly help, though.
I thought this article was working its way up to some profound statement, then I read this. Petraeus represents everything wrong with the modern leadership caste of America. He was a brown nosing, social climbing, rat-faced paper pushing apparatchik who never served in combat, screwed up Mosul, screwed up the rest of Iraq, then took credit for our massive "success" there, and proceeded to "lead" the CENTCOM by issuing press releases his lizard overlords told him to. Then he proceeded to "win" in Afghanistan (note sarcasm since we're still bloody there), take over the CIA (overseeing one of the greatest intelligence disasters of a recent US history littered with them: Benghazi), and get caught with his dong in his nitwit hagiographer, exposing classified information while he was at it to boot. He never showed any character or depth of thought, but he was a genius at handling the media, which is pretty much exactly the primary "leadership" characteristic of the modern era. Bleauch. Patton was an American leader. Petraeus will be forgotten as thoroughly as Gideon Pillow, excepting as a cautionary tale of who not to hire to pacify foreign polities when your empire is in the late Brezhnev stage of decomposition.
Anyway, yes, I am pretty sure Napoleon and Alexander the Great took long walks, and thought about things deeply. I'm not sure I want such people around, but I sure as shit don't want to hear about ding dongs like Petraeus being worthy of emulation because the dude might have read a book once.
The TLDR is - in order to escape group think and develop an original, authentic, foresightful understanding of our world, we need periods of solitude and reflection (and essentially forms of deep work though he doesn’t use that term), away from the constant stream of informational noise of modern life.
Honestly if you want actionable examples of actual leadership, any example from Plutarch's lives is going to be more informative than 50 paragraphs of hokum from some guy who makes his living flattering people who went to Yalevard (he apparently wrote a whole book filled with this crap).
There never should have been either Iraq war. It was all just big money players doing big money player evil things who caused all that.
My big concern currently is that there is a battle going on between the few remaining bright factions of government (e.g. people who still have a conscience) and the deep-state lizards as you called them. Right now, I think the lizards are winning. People like me are going to be either killed outright or will live in hiding as "gray men" pretty soon. I can't go along with this "new system" we're forming, it looks brutal and unjust but leftists will eat it up.
