This.

Those willing to unapologetically love something are those who get to control it culturally. As patriotism and the flag increasingly became shibboleths for the right, those fell to them.

Cynicism has done us no favors. It was lame when it was hung on the necks of Gen X and it’s lame now.

Has a very “I’m in middle school now, and can’t admit to enjoying Power Rangers“ vibe.

It’s okay to like things. We don’t always have to justify it, or add caveats to it— particularly if that like comes without harm.

I decided a few years ago to stop proverbially shitting on places I haven’t been, or don’t know well.

I realized I’d been carrying slanders that other people had applied to these places. I didn’t want to pass them on anymore.

They’re avoiding stand your ground states because their main aims are big Cities in “blue” states they were never going to win anyway, but score them points in the stand your ground ones.

Demonize Chicago for 50 years, then a lot more people are okay when you rape it. “It had it coming.”

I would love something more substantive.

So far as I can tell, this is a “we recognize the concept of a state, but neither a government nor borders… also whatever the government is can‘t have Hamas.“

Who and where?

Welcome to the internet, where everyone is angry all the time, disoriented, with a knife taped into their hand.

I think your replies were fine.

This medium is permeated with a strong urge to go bigger and to dunk on whomever you’re responding to. It can be hard to resist.

It’s unlikely that your part in this is going to be flashy or classically heroic. Your small, seemingly mundane actions, taken together with the rest of us, create something big, inexorable, and inevitable.

We succeed through endurance and persistence.

Spend purposefully. Where you have choices, avoid paying money to people who will use your money against your interests. Where you have fewer choices, choose a lesser evil.

If you can do without, that might be the best option.

Remember that this is a marathon— mind your sacrifices for endurance.

Remember that some of your allies will not be who you would’ve expected— don’t shy from them. What disagreements you have otherwise may remain. A coalition is built of people prioritizing progress where they agree over requirements of perfect alignment.

Keep showing up.

Vote every election, especially down-ballot.

Attend protests. Talk to people. Organize with your friends and neighbors.

This is a protracted problem, like climate change. There are no quick, clean, or easy solutions. It’s going to be a long haul. It’s going to be messy. It’s going to continue to be rough.

Recognizing commonalities is recognizing we are not bound by fate to be ever and always Good.

Being not fundamentally different, we could as easily slip into one form of villainy or another.

Take that as moral weakness if you will. I’ll happily take a better self-check if you’ve got one.

In this case, the commonalities I speak of are commonalities of form a mechanics, and the point in finding them is not so much about “bridging a gap,” as it is recognizing the sorts of traps people fall into.

I would add: “bothsidesism” can be a bogeyman meant to scare us into orthodoxy.

There are plenty enough significant differences; we oughtn’t be afraid of spotting our commonalities. There’s more than one way to make oneself a villain, but some of them paradoxically share mechanisms.

Surely, but blindness to my own biases is a recipe for trouble. My biases might align with the truth now, but I know I cannot trust that to always be the case, so I watch them thusly.

Good men are made greater, bad men worse by dint of memory. The point being he is what is useful to the speaker.

That’s what happens when a person dies: the living part recedes, the voice atrophies, and they become only the ideas people have about them.

It’s a ”build-your-own” Charlie Kirk. He is what is convenient to the writer— good or bad. He is angel, devil, and rhetorical device.

What’s interesting to me is what slop peddlers seem most eager to imitate: human faces and human voices.

The inherent argument seems to be that AI is “us, but better,” but the main value appears to be in the “us” part. Like they subconsciously understand that quiet element of human connection.

Our stories will be predictable in many ways— that’s the nature of this kind of storytelling… mythologizing. We repeat the stories, and we make them part of us. We make ideas into rallying cries.

We lift up the words of the learned and the eloquent; the passionate and the wise. They give us voice.

Hear hear.

We are a we. We disagree about a lot of things, but on these essentials, we are aligned.

And the stories we tell shape the world we live in. We need to do more than bark and whine at their stories of greed and ruin. We need to tell our own stories— stories of compassion and justice.

From the “brains are weird“ department: I read it as “recognition” the first time, and was confused, returning to the top, to see “revognition”

So… typoed successfully? :-)

Publicly funded is good.

Libertarian branding… is a whole other beast I’m not super worried about. Messaging to libertarians is about convincing them collective action is worthwhile at all, and that public goods can exist.

Unless I am much misrepresenting them.

Also: it eases time and financial burdens on parents, allowing them to provide better for their children, and participate better In the rest of society.

I’m not sure “state subsidized” is the winning form of it.

That Is to say, how would you frame it if you were advocating for it?

We do and we don’t.

We have an incomplete vision of the past, imagining those fights of the past to be clean, complete, and settled.

To pick one extreme example, we like to tell ourselves the Civil War ended at Appomattox, but that was just the open warfare. Troops occupied the South for years.

I’m not saying there’s nothing, just that I’m going to want more before holding this up as a mark of corruption.

I‘m suspicious of this. It’s a bit thin, and mostly from the kinds of rightwing outlets that profit off of setting her up as a bogeyman.

The difference seems to be mostly through her husband, and not off things which would have benefited from her knowledge as a congressperson.

Where in any of our teachings do we make blindness a virtue? When do our sages claim we should put out our eyes for our devotion?

Faith isn’t a mechanism for ignoring the inconvenient, nor is it valued in what it overlooks.

We are a people of study.

I cannot abide this.

This bears the implication that every time we have been persecuted, or murdered for our Jewishness, it’s from a lack of piety.

No. The pious and the secular get killed just the same when violence is visited upon us.

This is not about Hashem. This is about people.

This does seem pretty thin— particularly being reported predominantly from low-faith sources with high animus towards her.

And in some cases, it’s not necessarily animus, but opportunism in attacking a favored hobbyhorse for views.

I hate the term “DINO”, but for the sake of discussion:

Even if he’s only a democrat in name, this kind of thing can affect committee proportions(at least that’s how it works on the federal level).

It also reduces “spoiler power,” even if only psychologically.