This is an amazing pair of tweets so I'm going to talk about them, & I'll do so in a way that's authentic to me but that may turn some followers off. So if this isn't your jam then I totally get it. I don't often speak this way but I'll do so, here.
I've lived my life in a group that believes we are "redeemed... out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation." We have a fairly sophisticated view of humanity as being fundamentally w/ out race, sex, or class, & of the relation of those external markers to...
...to the interior self. We've also spent a lot of time navigating what it means to view these markers as purely external/temporal while also participating in a society that maintains hierarchies around them. My specific corner of this movement - American pentecostalism -- is...
& has been very much concerned w/ these binaries since its inception in the 1900's. One half of the early movement (Azuza St.) took the erasing of racial boundaries as a sign of the infilling of the Spirit & as a prophetic/millennial sign.
My own denomination has had battles...
...over so-called "gender distinctives" & the relationship between outer sex/gender markers & power (espc. around women's roles) both w/in the community & in the world.
This was a lot of throat-clearing to get to this point: I am not "anti-racist" & feel no obligation to be so.
To be clear, I'm a fifth-generation pentecostal who comes out a large tradition w/ a practice that has been at the project of dismantling racial boundaries for over 100 years, but we are not "anti-racist" in the modern Ibrahim X Kendi sense of the term. That's not our tradition.
I don't speak for Jeff Dean. I don't know that guy. But speaking for me, if you presume to lecture me based on the assumption that I take "anti-racism" as defined by Kendi to be a goal, you're mistaken. If you speak to me under the assumption that I don't do enough "work"...
on my own internal biases & prejudices, then again you're confused. I have a spiritual practice that foregrounds these issues in its own way, some of which you'd agree with, & some of which you would not.
So when, you, Emily Kager, undertake to lecture me about my interiority, my (and my multiracial, multiethnic) community's spiritual practices, or my non-adherence to your particular brand of NYT Bestseller religion, maybe take a beat.
I am a sinner, saved by grace. A hot mess. Really screwed up. Not worthy of a single blessing that I enjoy. Blessed beyond measure & wholly undeserving. I work out my salvation in fear & trembling, & I do /not/ work it out by your canon or your rules and categories.
This, tho, is basically how I feel when I'm in a professional context & someone undertakes to lecture me about my interior life & what kind of morals I should & shouldn't have. It's how I feel when a twitter purveyor of "tech tips" tries to give me a Sunday School lesson.
We can talk all day about what types of behaviors are & aren't appropriate, but when we get into telling people how they should be on the inside, & what kinds of morals they should have, & how they should relate to the world, then... well, I already get that somewhere else thnx.
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I've spent years in the pro-2A scene, where NRA leadership was widely known to be as corrupt & self-dealing as the public now sees it is. So why the universal support from gun owners?
LaPierre's pitch was, "Yeah I'm a monster, but I'm a monster who protects you from /them/."
This dynamic is behind the push to contrast 1/6 with the summer's riots. "Your city on fire, your neighborhood under siege -- that's what They want for you. Who do you trust to defend you against the crowd that burned cities & spun it as 'mostly peaceful'?"
In a moment like the this, after a summer of rioting & looting, with morgues overflowing & bodies stacking in refrigerator trucks, many will take "strong & wrong" over "weak & right."
Yesterday was a show of strength from the insurgents & of weakness from the establishment.
For some reason, I'm really disliking "is this a coup or not?" twitter -- either side of it. It feels like everyone is rushing into this debate to justify their posting history or whatever. Enough, guys. Whatever this was, it is still not over. We ain't yet done.
I feel like I'm trying to watch a movie and understand what's going on, and people are talking about the last scene and it's annoying because the current scene is also important and none of us know yet what the plot is.
I am just a dude on the internet, but to be honest I'm not convinced Trump is still really president. Is he? Pence sure did a lot of ordering of the NG & such, & there are weird comms from SecDef. Maybe Pence is de facto POTUS, or even de jure. I dunno! Fog of war.
This is coming here, soon. I don't care if you don't believe it or are over it. This is what we saw in Wuhan that made many of us sound the alarm in February. This is on its way to where you live, shortly.
For those asking, the oxygen shortages we're already seeing here in the US are (as far as I understand) a combo of canister shortages (due to sheer numbers) & the compressors/pipes breaking down w/ out ability to replace right now.
This is real. Scroll down for a copy of the actual order.
True story about this: I was in a ministry practicum in Divinity School, & the subject of my conservative denomination's stance on homosexuality came up. This gay minister in training was telling me, "you can't tell gay kids that their love is 'sin'."
... a canned answer I'd been trained to give, which was something like: "telling a sinner that they're in sin & need Christ is an act of love. If I'm sinning, then I'd want u to tell me, wouldn't I?"
That answer I gave didn't sit right w/ me, even at the time.
Now, I don't want to get into the merits of that answer in this thread, or what I think of it now. I bring this up to point out that Ali's reply here is precisely & exactly the reply Christians are trained to give in exactly this circumstance but w/ a different set of issues.
So, this is a REALLY good question. In fact I think it's probably the critical question that anyone who dedicates any time to this stuff has to keep answering on a regular basis.
My old answer is that these leftist tempests-in-a-teapot are ravaging professional tech circles. They flare up regularly in some programming language & open source communities, & really impact these communities' functioning & self-governance. This has ripple effects on software.
Very much a part of this is also the internal culture wars that rage inside Big Tech. These fights are happening inside Google, FB, & across the sector, & they both mirror & are directly connected to the Very Online lefty dustups. This has ripple effects on billions of users.