Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got?
I'll tell you:
You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you,
and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
Let me set up before your thoughts, good friends,
On supposition; which if you will mark,
You shall perceive how horrible a shape
Your innovation bears.
O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears,
And your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven
You'll put down strangers
kill them
cut their throats
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip in like a hound.
Say now the king
(as he is clement, if th' offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
Why, *you* must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs,
and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you
What would you think
To be thus used?
This is the strangers’ case;
And this
your mountainish
inhumanity.
____________
"The Stranger's Case," William Shakespeare
Sir Thomas Moore: Act II Scene 4
"What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust."
To those who scold that we mustn’t assume evil intentions into the actions of people who consistently pursue absolute evil with steadfast dedication and unshakable resolve: yes, we should.
I guess the ultimate answer to "you don't know what their true motivations are" is "who gives a shit what their motivations are?"
I care *that* you want to burn down my house. I only care *why* you want to burn down my house to the extent it helps me stop you.
Father: *strangles my brother*
Me: help help my father is murdering my brother
Centrist Cousin: it’s that sort of us vs them thinking that’s tearing this family apart
Me: no look literally he’s murdering my brother right in front of us
Centrist Cousin: he’s never going to want to stop if you keep vilifying him with overheated black and white language; I’ve engaged many stranglers and learned a lot about the complexities
Brother: gkkk gkk gk
Me: Look he’s about to die, for real; I really think we just need to stop my dad from killing him right now
Centrist Cousin: that’s exactly the sort of judgemental escalating bad thinking on our side that we need to criticize, I refuse to let myself become just as bad as he is
To be clear, that's any Republicans at any level for any position at any time, and honestly we may want to expand that to include Democrats willing to work with Republicans.
Shut the whole party down, out, and over.
If you want to live in a modern enlightened society and you vote for Republicans, no you don't.
As a Wordle pro on the tour, I feel I should share the best starting word, which all the pros know.
(My own personal favorite starting word is COCCYX, but if I show amateurs how to guess 6-letter words I will be banned from the Wordle Pro Tour and forced to sit next to Bret Stephens in the NYT cafeteria.)
Wordle is a game of constantly shifting strategy; I recommend you get the latest version of my strategy compendium, v14.
Specifically with this order. The one that exists. This reality. The way our systems and laws are set up, the way they’re codified and the way they’re operationalized. What they claim to intend to do, and what they actually do.
“The way things are,” in other words.
Let’s think of conservatism as being, in its essence, an orientation that desires to keep the existing order just as it is, or to make slow and deliberate calculated minor adjustments, to the existing order.
In BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Mickey Rooney played I. Y. Yunioshi, dressed up in buck teeth and a cartoon squint, a grotesque caricature of a Japanese person.
So I suppose in that sense “you wouldn’t be able” to make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today.
Which seems somehow preferable.
Now: what interests me is what it means to say *you can’t* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S these days.
It doesn’t mean you CAN’T. Unlike teaching, say,The Bluest Eye to Texas schoolchildren, there exist no laws to prevent Will Ferrell from putting in the teeth and playing Yunioshi.
So actually you *can* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today, I.Y. Yunioshi and all, and throw in Long Duc Dong if you want.
You can if you want wear blackface and dance around in white gloves, like Fred Astaire in SWING TIME, if you want to.