Astral Codex Ten

Jimmy Carter

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Jimmy Carter

Article

Jimmy Carter is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between July 08, 2022 and December 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter”; “You’re Jimmy Carter, and just 23 years ago you were an unemployed Navy dropout”; “other than Jimmy Carter, the speech actually goes over well”. It most often appears alongside The Outlier, Making Nature, The Dawn Of Everything.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: July 08, 2022
  • Last seen: December 30, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
I decided to read a 600-page book about Jimmy Carter because I was tired of only reading about the historical figures everyone already agrees are interesting.
But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.
Inline links: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
Naval Lieutenant Jimmy Carter: surprisingly attractive. Searching for a new career, Carter runs for State Senate, loses due to voter fraud, then challenges the results and wins by 15 votes in a new election. A few years later, he runs for governor, and loses for real this time, to avowed segregationist (and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox. Having never experienced failure in any way before, Carter is plunged into a profound spiritual crisis by this loss. Today, we would probably just say he was depressed. But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed,” you have a spiritual crisis.
Open Thread 239
August 28, 2022 · Original source
The Outlier (biography of Jimmy Carter)
Inline links: The Outlier
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
Kora In Hell, reviewed by Lucas Paletta. Lucas is a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He blogs (in Spanish) at www.stackdamage.com.ar. I really enjoyed all of these. A few notes of special praise: The Internationalists was probably most fascinating, in the sense of describing a strange historical episode I didn’t know about before. The Outlier was similar and I give it high marks for making Jimmy Carter interesting. Consciousness And The Brain was a whole new neuroscience theory I knew nothing about and I expect to reread it a bunch of times to try to get it to sink in. Sam Altman sent me an email saying he enjoyed the review of The Future Of Fusion Energy. The Making Nature review did a great job talking about and analyzing a trend I’d never thought about before, far beyond even what was in the book. I think about Exhaustion every time I see a CFS patient - specifically, about the claim that 19th century psychiatrists would prescribe a “West cure” of going off and doing cowboy things on a ranch; I haven’t yet recommended that to anyone, but like I said, I think about it often. God Emperor of Dune and Kora In Hell were the token fiction and poetry reviews; I thought they did a spectacular job overcoming the difficulties of reviewing their respective media. I was reading some of the non-finalists and found 1587 in there and was surprised it hadn’t reached finalist status and decided to promote it; based on your votes it seems like that was the right choice. My process for picking finalists was kind of haphazard; I had you rate all reviews on a scale of 1-10, anyone above 8 got in automatically, and then I picked my favorites from the reviews between 7 and 8. This was sort of unfair, and meant there were some reviews that scored better on the voting than finalists but weren’t finalists themselves, and others that I liked better than some finalists but couldn’t pick. All of these are Honorable Mentions. You’ll notice some of them are politically charged, and yes, I did sort of discriminate against these (though not so much that I wouldn’t have picked them if they’d made it above 8). They are: Unsettled, reviewed by Julius S. Julius is a machine learning engineer from San Diego. He blogs at Curious About Ideas.
Inline links: Kora In Hell, www.stackdamage.com.ar, Unsettled, Curious About Ideas
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
By the mid-seventies, Nader was at the height of his influence. George McGovern briefly considered him for vice president, but Nader said no, and also refused entreaties to run as a third-party candidate—at this point, he was staunchly against getting involved in electoral politics. After Jimmy Carter received the Democratic nomination in 1976, he took a three-hour meeting with Nader, where Nader spent the entire time lecturing him about how government “really” worked. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell said, “Nader is the single most effective antagonist of American business,” which Nader probably took as a compliment.
The answer starts with Nader’s uncompromising moral worldview. There never has been, and probably never will be, a president who lived up to his extreme standards. Take Jimmy Carter: even though Carter granted Nader unprecedented personal access, and even though many Naderites had high-level positions in Carter’s administration, Nader did nothing but criticize him, and in fact actively undermined his re-election15. “Reagan will help [our movement]” by galvanizing the opposition, Nader predicted, comically inaccurately. Decades later he finally admitted that Carter had in fact been the most pro-consumer president of his lifetime.
Inline links: 15, finally admitted
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
If monogamous marriage changes testosterone levels, what does the rise of serial monogamy do to that relationship? How does the WEIRD complex function when work disappears, if there’s a shortage of marriageable men and a mother might do better raising a kid herself – in the 90s in US cities, and today maybe in Ohio? If Jimmy Carter was an example of Protestant guilt culture when he said “I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times,” what does that culture look like in the age of Donald Trump? How will modern institutions react back on the WEIRD complex? There’s a famous answer that capitalism eats its own roots.
Inline links: when work disappears, capitalism eats its own roots
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
Public Citizens, reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max writes at Candy for Breakfast. You may remember him from last year's review of The Outlier, about the life of Jimmy Carter.
Inline links: Public Citizens, Candy for Breakfast, last year's review of
Open Thread 362
December 30, 2024 · Original source
1: RIP Jimmy Carter. One of the 2022 Book Review contest finalists was a Carter biography, which I reread today in his honor.
Inline links: a Carter biography