Indeed the will of the voters, but the divide between the east and west sides of the state is profound. Democratic legislators and the bulk of Oregon’s population on the west side of the state (majority democratic) don’t often represent the values of people around here. (Whether I agree with them or not.) It’s fostering real resentment, and I worry about what that means long-term.
Those that win elections should be as gracious as the losers, and in this state, that doesn’t always feel true.
(That said, I’d much rather live here than in almost any other state.)
When Betty Friedan called attention in the 1960s to the lack of women’s rights, she described it as “the problem that has no name.” In a similar way, there isn’t a good term for the bundle of pathologies that have afflicted working-class Americans like Bill.
My “How America Heals” series has explored how to overcome these afflictions, which include stagnant incomes, addiction, homelessness, suicide, chronic pain, loneliness and early death. We still don’t fully understand how they are correlated or why most of them affect men more than women. I do believe that, as with Friedan’s probing of gender inequity, our explorations of these problems will help us chip away at them. That’s the reason for this series: A nation cannot thrive when so many have been left behind.
“A nation cannot thrive when so many have been left behind.”
If there’s any one sentence than could sum up my feelings about America, it is this one.
Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.
The endgame is unclear. Reoccupation? Mass emigration? Who can say? Yes, Hamas can be physically destroyed. But support for it has soared since the war began; and I know of no person more committed to revenge than a parent whose child has been murdered. We were right to note how tight-knit Israeli society is, and how deep a trauma October 7 was for so many. Can we even imagine the psychological impact of 9,000 dead children? The Gazans are humans too. Am I being too sentimental in talking about infanticide rather than just civilian deaths? Not when the vulnerable population is so disproportionately young; not when just war theory would demand safety for every single one of them.
This is how it is when wars are launched swiftly, overwhelmingly, and in an understandable spasm of justified rage. Think of the position of Israel on October 8. The true evil of Hamas was exposed; most of the decent world grieved with Israel. Think of the long-term goals the Israelis could have achieved if they had taken a breath, thought deeply and strategically, and acted deliberately, in consort with their recently acquired Arab interlocutors.
Now look: a wasteland of death, a charge of genocide at The Hague, a huge propaganda loss in the wider world, 132 hostages still out of reach, and no coherent idea of what to do the day after, if the day after ever comes.
Andrew Sullivan, doing his damndest to answer my question, "Who do I want to be like when I grow up?"
This war between Gaza and Israel has been brutal. Old personal relationships have resurfaced, only to be ripped away. The subject feels incredibly fraught and tender, full of strange bedfellows and unexpected allegiances. My long-held opinions have been shaken as I watch people who had no interest in the region suddenly espouse strong and often vitriolic opinions of their own. Like anything in America, the Middle East has become a proxy for our culture wars.
A hundred days in, I find myself back where I was immediately after the attacks: Israel cannot call itself "civilized" if it permits the people of Palestine to suffer as it does. Really — what did Israel think would happen after years of an active blockade of Gaza? Sure, Egypt is party to blame, but come on. Let's not bullshit each other.
Over the last hundred days, I've been more persuaded by the principles Zionism than ever before. When I once thought the pluralism of America was proof enough that Israel did not need to exist, I now see that very pluralism threatening to fade away. And in a world with plenty of nations are explicitly and officially Muslim, why not one that is Jewish? Yes.
But this status quo cannot hold. Israel is losing — and perhaps has already lost — any moral high ground it had on October 6th.
Barak remembers feeling deeply frustrated when Netanyahu won the tight 2022 election, “not because he won or there had been some change from the previous electoral cycles,” he said, “but because of the typical weakness of the left, unable to see the whole picture and failing to join forces.”
Donald Trump is going to be the nominee. In November 2024, tens of millions of Americans will vote for him. The only uncertainty is whether or not he will eke out enough votes in a handful of states to carry the Electoral College.
Even if you are highly confident that Trump will lose, how confident are you? Put a number on that, for me. Do you think Biden has a 9-in–10 chance of being re-elected?
Now answer me this: Would you get onto an airplane if I told you that it had a 1-in–10 chance of crashing?
A few years ago, I was a hardcore partisan. I spent most of my day surrounded by very smart people—lawyers, economics professors, successful businesspeople, and philosophers at Yale—who agreed with me and echoed everything that I wanted to hear about the dangers of big government (I’m a libertarian). My social media feeds, the news I consumed, and the books I read were full of the world’s smartest takes on why I was right.
Yet I was miserable. I was consumed by fear and anger towards the other side—all the progressives and conservatives who refused to see what was so blindingly obvious to me. My friendships suffered because I saw each conversation as binary: had I managed to move people towards libertarianism or not? If not, I judged the interaction a failure. Luckily, I didn’t lose any close friendships, but many of my relationships were fraying; and none of them had the intimacy that I yearned for.
I could have written these paragraphs.
I’ve lost more than one friend in the last few years. At first, because of my dogmatism. More recently, because of theirs.
I’ve watched family members drift away. I’ve watched people much older than I lose life-long friends over politics. I once thought that was admirable, but I’ve changed.
I feel called to write about these social dynamics because I’ve been on both sides. It wasn’t long ago that I hated all conservatives. But I’ve watched that hate infect people I love and care for… and it’s heartbreaking.
…we weren’t allowed to point out the clear danger of the moment because the media decided early in the cycle that any questions about Clinton’s electability were simply a stalking horse for misogyny. The party and its loyalists insisted that it was sexist to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Clinton had severe vulnerabilities in basic public sentiment; here’s a version from the NYT. Under the conditions of 2016, with the incumbency advantages and Trump’s unique issues, you would have wanted to elect someone who simply didn’t have the level of negative baggage that Clinton did, someone who the country generally saw as inoffensive. Yglesias nominates Martin O’Malley, but of course Bernie Sanders fit the bill as well. Sanders beat Trump in poll after poll, and cleaned up with independents, which would seem to be important in a presidential election. Clinton apparatchiks have always scoffed at those polls, asserting without evidence that Republican oppo would have sunk him without caring much that Republican oppo was already sinking Hillary.
Bernie, of course, also would have energized the youth like no other, setting up the Democrats for durable gains down the road with that demographic.
I know several people still litigating the issue. All of them, liberals to their core, insist that Hillary lost only because she was a woman.
This has never made sense to me. It starts from a place of assuming the absolute worst about people (that everyone, even fellow liberals, are complicit in misogyny) and ends with zero introspection about one’s own political biases. It’s lazy thinking.
The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.
Being a citizen of this country feels like standing on the rails, watching a train barrel down the track right at you. You want to move, but none of your limbs seem to agree on what to do.
And I’m becoming angry.
It’s hard not to be angriest at the people most like you, which is why the Left seems to be eating itself alive. It hurts to watch people you know to be kind, caring, and compassionate succumb to the hate, the vitriol, the judgment, the division that’s long polluted the Right.
And it’s hard not to take their succumbing as a betrayal. They so easily gave up on all the shit they claimed to believe in, which only fuels my rage. I’ve known for a long time that the Right was only about power, never about morality or religion or “family values.” But the Left, too?
But watching the hatred consume Liberals has been agonizing, though not unrelatable. I get it — I really do. It’s so delicious, so righteous to hate the people that hate you. I’m guilty of this very thing.
But it’s easy. And unoriginal. And only makes a bigger mess of things.
The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.
Andrew Sullivan, once again seeing through the bullshit.
The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preachers. And Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.
The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism, which is why it isn’t actually surprising that self-professed Christians came to support a man who cultivates greed, gluttony, pride, lust, envy, sloth and anger more assiduously than Satan. Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.
What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict. It hasn’t gone away, even if its actual policy prescriptions are unpopular, even if it represents only a fraction of Americans, as wokeness does. It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants.
Young people now arrive at elite colleges with the assumption that not only will they be seen, heard and meticulously cared for, but also that their own politics will broadly align with those of the institutions they have chosen to attend. They have been given little reason to think otherwise.
With universities run as for-profit business, why are we surprised that students are now insisting “the customer is always right?”
To be clear: the customer is not always right.
Yet we’ve let this attitude persist in the larger economy for at least as long as I’ve been alive. Let’s not act surprised when this attitude follows capitalism everywhere it insists on going. Academia is no exception.
The naivety of some grown adults — in this case, college administrators hell-bent on making ever-more money off their students — is astonishing. If you use people, expect them to use you in return.
The reality of categorizing people with distinct labels has never been simple.
People with identical lineage may choose different boxes, and the same person may choose different boxes in different years. Former President Barack Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya, for example, marked himself as “Black,” even when checking more than one race was an option.
Historically, some edits to census race boxes reflected changes in policy or public sentiment. As the nation’s laws on slavery shifted, the census began phasing out the counting of enslaved people and instead introduced new terms to define the Black population.
Fascinating.
I’ve long struggled with categorization, both self- and not. It’s no wonder we humans attempt to categorize (it is, after all, the basis for all language), but when we attempt to categorize another person, that’s when it all goes to hell.
Recently, the term ‘LGBTQ’ (or ‘LGBTQIA+,’ if you’re feeling radically inclusive) has come into fashion. I hate it. No, I loathe it. As a gay man, my experience has little in common with that of a trans person or someone who is “questioning.” I’m not questioning anything, so why am I grouped with those folks?
I see the LGBTQ label as insulting, created by a hetero-majority that can’t be bothered remembering the specifics of my lived experience. Instead, we’re all just thrown into this alphabet soup of ‘otherness.’
On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
…
What would this death cult do if it could do anything? We have glimpsed that over the past 72 hours. We know what they are capable of, and we know that they have many defenders here at home. Those who imagine themselves fomenting the long-awaited revolution. Those who know that the beloved academic language of decolonization means nothing if you’re unwilling to see it enacted in flesh, and especially blood.
This is a fascinating time to be watching the politics of academia.
MAGA is not interested in building anything, in winning a real majority, in constructing an actual future rather than lamenting an invented past. Everything is performative and destructive. It’s all driven by who they are against rather than what they are for. As a Republican Senator told Romney as he settled in, their view is that the first consideration in voting on any bill should always be: “Will this help me win re-election?”
There’s no definitive moment in the collapse of a republic, but that quote comes close. If all you care about is your own grip on power, regard the opposing party as ipso facto illegitimate, and give zero fucks for the system as a whole, a liberal democracy has effectively ceased to exist. A single major party, captured by radicals and nihilists, can do that.
I think I’ve accepted the rhetorical framing of the L.G.B.T. community simply because it is widely adopted in our politics and in our discourse. But I tend to agree that it’s not necessarily a legitimate concept in that I’ve never really felt a part of any community. I’ve never felt welcomed. In fact, I’ve mostly felt rejected or attacked. I also think that I’m completely supportive of the rights of transgender adults to live their best lives however they see fit. But I’ve never truly understood the lumping in or connection of transgender issues and gay rights issues. They always have seemed to me to be somewhat distinct.
It doesn’t sound like Mr. Polumbo and I have much in common politically, and while I can’t agree that “I’ve accepted the rhetorical framing of the L.G.B.T. community” (I have not), I really feel his sentiments about community.
In my humble opinion, gay culture has far too warm an embrace with hedonistic capitalism, with empty consumerism, with the vacuous pop culture of Instagram and People magazine and Bravo. Put simply: we sold out. And to express this sentiment openly is to be labeled a traitor to “the community.”
The appeal of traumatic literalism is not so much its scientific rigor as its scientific sheen, which seems to promise objective, graspable solutions to our defining political crises. For the past three decades, liberals have insisted that the institutions of American power, while flawed, were in essentially good shape. Those for whom the status quo wasn’t working out were welcome to jockey for inclusion by claiming identity-related injury. For a liberal politics of inclusion founded on claims of injury, what could be more useful than a way to turn that injury into biological trauma, something objective, observable, and measurable in the brain? In their focus on narrative — that is, on recovering and integrating declarative memories — the battle lines of the ’80s and ’90s trauma culture wars were staked out along clear lines. If you were a feminist or an antiwar activist, you invoked trauma; if you were a conservative, you didn’t. But today’s literalization of trauma is politically promiscuous. In fact, rather than treating trauma as an ideological weapon of the left, now the right wants in on it too.
Don’t worry, this article is only a touch about Vivek. Much like the man himself, I encourage you to skip over that part and get right to the take-away line:
Ron DeSantis was right when he said at the debate that America is a nation in decline and that decline is a choice. He just wasn’t right in the way he meant it. We’re in decline because a spirit of lawlessness, shamelessness and brainlessness have become leading features of a conservative movement that was supposed to be a bulwark against all three.
When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well.
A lottery would also improve our odds of avoiding the worst candidates in the first place. When it comes to character, our elected officials aren’t exactly crushing it. To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., I’d rather be governed by the first 535 people in the phone book. That’s because the people most drawn to power are usually the least fit to wield it.
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.
You might have some swivel-eyed loons in your life. I certainly have my share. Remember that we have common ground.
When they say they don’t trust vaccines because the pharma compa nies are corrupt and their regulators are toothless, that’s not your signal to defend the manifestly corrupt pharma companies who murdered 800,000 Americans with opioids, nor to cape for the regulators who let them get away with it.
Likewise, we all want to “save the children.” It’s just that some of us want to save the children from real threats who never seem to face justice – youth pastors, Catholic priests, rich people with private islands, border agencies practicing “family separation” – while swivel-eyed loons want to save kids from imaginary threats (adrenochrome-guzzling Satanists).
Remember all the things they’re right about. Lean into the common ground. Help them understand that corporate power, and its capture of government, is our true shared enemy.
According to its 29 authors, who are primarily scientists (including two Nobel laureates) in fields as varied as theoretical physics, psychology and pharmacokinetics, ideological concerns are threatening independence and rigor in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Though the goal of expanding opportunity for more diverse researchers in the sciences is laudable, the authors write, it should not be pursued at the expense of foundational scientific concepts like objective truth, merit and evidence, which they claim are being jeopardized by efforts to account for differing perspectives.
This encapsulates why the Left, once the bastion of Enlightenment principles, has left me behind in recent years.
It should go without saying — but in today’s polarized world, unfortunately, it doesn’t — that the authors of this paper do not deny the existence of historical racism or sexism or dispute that inequalities of opportunity persist. Nor do they deny that scientists have personal views, which are in turn informed by culture and society. They acknowledge biases and blind spots.
Where they depart from the prevailing ideological winds is in arguing that however imperfect, meritocracy is still the most effective way to ensure high quality science and greater equity.
The lack of nuance on the political Left is troubling and has become stunningly common. Here are some of their greatest hits: I’ve been called a “white supremacist” by fellow grad school writers because I edit their work. (In their view, the very act of editing is oppression.) Fellow academics have called me “conservative” because I argue for compassion for everyone — including for white, rural, conservative people. I’ve been called a transphobe because biological sex is real, and I have no compunctions saying so. I’ve been called an “assimilationist” because I’m a gay man who lives in a small rural town surrounded by conservative straight people.
(It’s important to note that the Left hasn’t swung out farther left. They’ve swung toward illiberalism, and in that sense, I think they’ve made a swing to the right.)
One needn’t agree with every aspect of the authors’ politics or with all of their solutions. But to ignore or dismiss their research rather than impartially weigh the evidence would be a mistake. We need, in other words, to judge the paper on the merits. That, after all, is how science works.
Logic, reason, the scientific method, the pursuit of objectivity… when and why did these ideals fall from favor?
According to Pornhub, Utah’s law mandating age verification differs from Louisiana’s law in at least one meaningful way. In Louisiana, the state government created a digital wallet that Pornhub could access to securely verify state IDs. Because Utah has no such technology, Axios reported, Pornhub said it had no choice but to make “the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website” in Utah.