1/A brief thought about the Critical Race Theory wars.
When my dad was in high school, a girl he knew got pregnant. Abortion was illegal, so she had an illegal underground abortion, which was botched and rendered her permanently infertile...
2/She was also a devout Catholic, so this caused a huge rift with her family. She developed severe mental issues because of this, and was basically incapacitated for life.
The ban on abortion utterly ruined her life.
3/When I was young, Culture Wars in America were all about abortion. Right-wingers would picket abortion clinics and pass laws to make abortion harder to get. Occasionally someone would even murder a doctor for doing abortions.
4/So when I see our Culture Wars shifting to whether kids are taught this or that social theory in schools, I sort of breathe a sigh of relief, because at least this isn't something that directly destroys people's lives, like the Abortion Wars did.
5/Of course, I'm concerned with any threat to free speech on general principle, but I expect the courts to handle it.
6/And as for whether what social theories kids learn in school will change the future of our national culture, as many people seem to expect...I doubt it.
Kids are going to learn all that stuff from the internet. I mean, that's what everyone does now!
7/In any case, the Critical Race Theory Wars are very stupid, but...maybe that's not such a bad thing?
If right-wingers are always going to get enraged over something (and they are), it might as well be over something relatively low-stakes.
🤷
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General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thought Trump might attempt a coup after the election. He and other military brass were prepared to stop it.
He explicitly and repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler, and MAGA activists to brownshirts.
We've reached some sort of inflection point in our politics where things have stopped meaning anything, and have become in-group signals without any external significance.
All the shouters have found product-market fit now. They have their messages down, their followings are primed to mash the retweet button. Everyone stays in their lane. There's little real discussion, just an infinite recursion of hipsterisms.
I need to do a whole running series of stories about the weird encounters I have when I wear my "Free Hong Kong" shirt around San Francisco. Everyone stops me and wants to talk politics.
Today a Greek immigrant real estate developer stopped me to give me a very dadcon lecture about how socialist kids are just lazy, and if you work hard and believe in God, anyone can succeed.
In the middle of his spiel he stopped to say hi to his friend, a Black construction worker who was walking down the street with a boombox blasting Kpop.
This, by the way, is why I think "realist" fiction is actually a more fantastical kind of fantasy than the kind with dragons.
In "realist" fiction, the fantasy is how the characters feel and behave. But unlike dragons, people believe this fantasy represents reality.
People will read "Cat Person" and think they now know the dark truth about human relationships. But the real relationship "Cat Person" was based on, while not ideal, was much sweeter and healthier than the dark fantasy depicted in the story.