Hannah Kardon

Icosium Kafe love you for always although the handwritten “I’m done with crepes” sign was a killer way to close

Job probably the oldest story in the Bible and is all about how people refuse to accept this and want reasons for suffering! In Genesis 1 God’s breath covers and creates over/out of the chaos, not badness. One of the oldest human struggles to understand and grapple with chance’s role in our lives.

As clergy people want to talk to you about the ‘problem of evil’ all the time but evil actually very understandable, people get it - it’s chaos, randomness, why did that person get sick or hit by a car, that baffles and pains us and drives us towards unsatisfying or actively harmful “explanations”

“that meet the requirements of a 501c3” - a filing you make with your state at incorporation!

not all religious non-profits are churches, many religious non-profits do annual audits, and many less institutional non-religious non-profits don’t! if you want to require filed yearly audits for every non-profit go ahead and advocate for it, that’s not the same as “fees for some identities”

they have to file status, all money has to go back into the org not into shareholders or owners, they have finances, boards, malfeasance is subject to prosecution. what do you think religious non-profits aren’t doing that the Association of Mazda Enthusiasts or local Norwegian-Americans Club is?

they’re not exempt because they’re religious, they’re exempt because they are non-profit. for-profit religious enterprises are taxed like any other business. arbitrarily punishing one style of voluntary association non-profit over others is very bad for a free civil society?? this seems obvious

along with an expansive definition of work that includes a whole lot of pleasure and leisure (travel if I answer one phone call is “work,” fancy dinner if it’s with someone I once made a deal with is “work”) most workers would never be allowed to include as part of their working hours

Talking about elite universities is a way of demanding power be aristocratic (specially selected few based on criteria determined by currently powerful, proximity to power > talent or effort) while sounding putatively meritocratic, which is why it plays such an outsized role in elite discourse

Is it? Fifty years ago the same types said overpopulation would be world ending crisis and turns out humans self-managed lower birth rates and invented ways to make more food. We respond to new circumstances with new choices and I see no reason to believe crisis hype more this time.

Not just no effort, no desire. Because AI turned your lights off at 9 you won’t yearn for your phone, because AI filled your fridge with veggies you won’t want treats. Imagining an impossible human who acts like a computer alongside this impossible LLM who acts human, and all to what end?

Further evidence for the “abuser does family annihilation,” Bouie “revenge on America” way of thinking about Trump II - even critical constituencies will be brutally and specifically attacked along with everyone else as they attempt to fully destroy the country for having ever rejected him

Some of the most interesting, kind regular people and strangest campus-obsessed reactionary centrists you know are both a result of the fact that for many white Americans, college is the most integrated residential environment they ever experience

For me helps to remember that every group of humans, of every type, has some who use that group id to hurt & hide and some who use it to connect & grow. It’s not the group, it’s that choice inside it. Making that choice honors ancestors who did the same, and makes it easier for others to follow.

“I’d like us to be having cures for dementia” while actively funding and empowering people destroying any medical research capacity. Shameful.

Maybe, but at this point most mainline churches in the US are publicly & wildly supportive of a wide range of ids. Think there are real other barriers (schedule, general societal allergy to ‘joining,’ heritage financial and physical structures) to any thick community that have to be reckoned with.

Such a great list! Would add Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Chicanas of 18th Street, People Wasn’t Made to Burn, Division Street, The Defender for anyone making a Chicago non-fic TBR

worth revisiting house on mango street, maud martha, native son, jungle & studs lonigan the classics, iceberg slim if you like old pulp, clark and division if mysteries, the davenports or natalie caña if romance, chasing vermeer for kids, have heard dresden files for fantasy, dark matter for sci fi

think its an evocative & perennial part of “gender wars” discourse - it was early 2000s so Iraq was on the mind but in my high school all the feminism skeptical boys expressed rage and fear about the draft. stopping sex-based selective service might help? but would also be discoursed.

Second degree, but - Dad returns from meeting at Nets game. “There was a really interesting guy there, businessman, really great to talk to but I think he also makes music? Do you know of a…Mr. James Z?”

Cue brothers & I screaming “You met Jay-Z and didn’t know??!?!?!!”on and off for years.

not a strategist but have been surprised to not hear “he’s trying to steal all YOUR stuff” more as a line of attack. it’s true, makes me personally rageful, and applies to every American! sometime think pols take this part for granted, but we the people might need the reminder.

underrated how the kind of people Trump picks for leadership are not only incompetent and desire evil outcomes but have never worked real jobs (because he hasn’t either) and so are completely undone by basic stuff like long days and meetings

genuinely, would be game changing for political journalism if everyone who writes about it was required to join a single community activity where they have to interact with others and aren’t allowed to talk about politics.

public stances on national initiatives that affected every American in negative, concrete ways are the same as public stances on internecine party machinations about a guy many voters have literally already forgotten. I touch grass often and have many normal friends.

Because they’ve basically filled up all their housing so now it all goes to richer, smaller households who max out ability to pay, right? I assume if any of those places built more housing it would fill up immediately, the decreases aren’t reflecting where people do or don’t desire to live

(the american christian nationalists of the type you’re talking about would probably sooner eat dirt than call themselves protestant, mainline style us prot.s as likely to have a rainbow or blm flag in front of their church as anything else, but your overall point stands and hell yeah)

feels like often advice for how to act in personal relationship with someone vs in initial conversation with stranger vs how to run a communal space vs how to interact with someone who has power over you like a politician get squashed into one thing when they require quite distinct approaches

In these comments you mix how people donate to charities with how charities get taxed on land and assets, faith communities with faith based social service organizations, and government grants with tax policy. Not sure you understand how our current system works, which is why your recs don’t track.

“non-profit” doesn’t mean “charity” it means literally “does not operate with profit.” It’s how you get bowling leagues, neighborhood associations, and yes mosques & churches, all building blocks of civil society. Why would religious non-profits be treated differently than non-religious non-profits?

So you think it is good for America and democracy to target only religious non-profits to pay additional taxes other non-profits don’t pay, functionally making illegal a third to a half of all civil society in the country during a time when the state is trying to consolidate power?