Yup. Time to review why you can't let fascists have even an inch, why we have to make it ACTUALLY socially unacceptable to be a Nazi. theestablishment.co/why-punching-n…
Beware "those who see Nazis as perfect foils for their ideological posturing rather than very real genocidal extremists with a long and bloody track record," because they're going to wring their hands at the idea of shunning these people.
Fascism's not one political ideology among many. It is "specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else."
It's not a political ideology: it has no actual vision of governance to present. Its ultimate--and only real--goals are the arrogation of power to itself and the elimination of entire populations.
It is political malware.
Or, as Cross puts it, very elegantly:
"Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter; coming into contact with it is often destructive for our institutions because it is the personification of bad faith with malice aforethought."
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Yeah, the thing about diversity is it doesn’t mean any particular way of being is superior full stop. Different ways may do better in *some circumstances.*
Being different from the norm can feel superior because your way of being is *underutilized.*
The thing you learn if your brain doesn’t work like the standard, when you dig into how the world isn’t designed for you, and then apply what you’ve learned about yourself to observing other people?
There are no normies.
Everyone is a mosaic, and I don’t think there’s any one of us for whom every last piece fits the standard.
And if the ways in which you’re different are ones that are denigrated, it’s very tempting to view your difference as making you complex and deep where others are shallow.
So, don’t take it from me: take it from someone with a PhD: the way we conceptualize “religion” means that the only religion that exists is Christianity (and *maybe* Islam). (Thanks, @maklelan !) (1/x)
This is why I generally use the term “tradition” or “culture” or “practice” when talking about Jewish stuff.
As I keep saying, the religious/secular distinction is a Christian framework, and it is—sometimes explicitly, sometimes unacknowledged—a tool of colonialism.
The idea that you can just pull out the “religion” module of a culture and replace it with a different one (if you’re doing Christian evangelism) or none at all (if you’re doing antitheist evangelism) is… not how cultures work.
IIRC correctly, there's a correlation between higher IQ and higher rates of depression and other unhappiness--as one of my therapists said, "it's harder for smart people to figure out to be happy."
Like, we have a habit, in our fiction, of characterizing happiness as foolishness or oblivious. Simple people are happy because they don't know better.
But identifying what *actually makes us happy* is an emotional intelligence challenge most of us fail.
And almost everything in life that we pursue is a proxy for happiness: we think love will make us happy, we think fame or recognition will make us happy, we think money will make us happy.
We sacrifice a lot of things that might make us happy to pursue happiness proxies.
I’m hardly the first person to say this, but Luke’s gloss on the lost sheep parable that there’s more rejoicing over the repentant sinner than the 99 who didn’t stray has probably done more harm to the world than anything in the NT other than the Great Commission. So toxic.
Like imagine being a child abused by your youth pastor and hearing in essence that having abused you is PART of why he’s more spiritually valuable than you are.
After all, one needs to sin in order to repent. Combine that with the Christian idea that suffering is ennobling and not only is your abuser using your pain as a necessary component in his spiritual elevation, but he’s doing you a favor by giving you a chance to suffer nobly.
So—and this is not about Jamie Foxx, I’m not touching that one other than to point out that you should prioritize listening to Black Jews over anyone else on it—let’s talk about why the figure/story of Judas is antisemitic by itself, and why that’s so invisible to most Christians
The reason some Jewish scholars have suggested that the story of Judas is a later, ahistorical, and intentionally antisemitic addition is that it *doesn’t actually make sense* in the story.
It certainly is dramatic and emotionally evocative—conspiracy! betrayal! tragic end for a guilty villain!—but if you actually *read the story,* it’s superfluous.
The Kokobot thing is SO dark and like, I don't wanna be an AI doomer (there are some things that (human-supervised) AI can do better than humans without AI! we're just not doing much of that for some reason) but this is literally the only thread talking about this I found. (1/x)
And hey, it's from someone who follows me! That makes me feel sort of warm and fuzzy about the sort of people who follow me!
But also, wow, tweets in this thread have maybe one like each, which tells me very few people read it. So READ IT, and I'm going to elaborate on it.
So. Kokobot.
A mental health nonprofit decided to run a mental health experiment on users between the ages of 18 and 25 without their knowledge or consent, having a bot contact them if they were using "crisis-related language."