Many Jewish leaders believed, in the shadow of the murderous particularism of mid-century Germany, that the solution was universalism. But universalism is just that- it dissolves all bonds, renders all down to base components; it is incompatible with collective identity. It is as incompatible in the end, with Jewishness as it is with any other collective identity. Thus the ideal had to be a sort of kludge: non-universalist universalism, universalism for some, in some places, at some times, in some degree- but not all, everywhere, always, total.

And the hits just keep on coming from Sober, Intellectual Conservatism today. The adults are back online. There’s an entire worldview that boils down to this headline, and part of political life is about the constant collective need to drive these people out of power with a whip. I am not a populist because “populism” means nothing, but resistance to misrule is a human duty.

This is not a dunk, but the open bipartisan cross-ideological tolerance, verging into outright celebration, of racial hierarchy and racial vengeance, racial superiority and racial blood-guilt, made this inevitable. The form of anti-semitism is a shared framework now.

https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1722734818314609151

This is why hatred of Jews, hatred of white people, hatred of men, etc. are not separable as issues. The patterns we see now are very much characteristic of historical anti-semitism, but those patterns became institutionalized by choosing more politically acceptable targets.

The argument has been that there is something inherently superior, both morally and practically, about migrants- they were more willing to work, more entrepreneurial, willing to make due with less, more in tune with American values, more patriotic (somehow), thus more deserving.

https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1699884459833667643

That’s easy to believe when you’re comparing an idealized migrant to the worst assumptions you harbor about your domestic enemies; less so when comparing actual human beings, their needs and strengths and frailties, against all of your most cherished assumptions about yourself.

It’s worth noting that there is almost no one in the entire GOP who is making any kind of a case, to anyone, for why they individually or the party as a whole should be put in power. It’s like the idea of doing such a thing doesn’t even register as possible or necessary. There’s a negative case based on issues with Democrats, but even that’s barely getting made; and what’s the positive case? “We’re angry about non-specific process violations at DOJ”? What group of Americans has any reason to think they stand to benefit from a GOP presidency?

In some ways the difference between left and right is that the left will create a sense of belonging and community which it holds over the heads of people with the threat of leaving them isolated, while the right cuts to the chase and just tells them to kill themselves up front. The left will spend decades carefully building up institutional capacity through NGOs and associations, weaving their way into the lives of young people and becoming the default against which other things are measured; the right will say, hey, prove you’re not defective.

Always it comes back to this: a demand for people to stop trying to understand the world or exert any control over it, because they are not legitimate actors with any right to do so. It is the fundamental assumption of totalitarianism, whatever other trappings it takes on.

https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1670423800842969088

Every excuse of this kind is an attempt to set up an unchallengeable source of absolute authority that people must pay deference to, no matter the cost. Science, God, the state, “progress,” a book, the nation, men cycle through justifications, but the same impulse remains below.

The mistake here is to think that formats which privilege useless, badly-designed, often fraudulent arguments which steal the name of “study” is innately better. But this is the same demand as “debate me”- an attempt to load the deck on fundamental questions to avoid scrutiny.

https://twitter.com/dannagal/status/1670250032849727488

The act of dismissing any ideas or perspectives that you don’t value as inherently untruthful is itself an almost textbook definition of bad faith; and there it is right in the dead center of a defense of “the science.”

This is a desperate claim of privilege, no more or less.

People carrying high school with them too far into life is a recognized trope, but there’s a second phase of it in which people finally settling down in middle age and people who were always settled and self-consciously boring regard each other with a complex tangle of emotions. They more people make it into their 30’s and 40’s without lasting marriages, the more of a fault line this is going to become. People finally feeling things tilt their way but only as a last option, people still terrified of “settling,” seeing old resentments in each other, etc.

You can pick apart the individual biography and choices of any one person who presents their situation as a major collective problem, but if you have to do this over and over and over, maybe it actually is a collective problem. And that may require a policy response. In this situation there’s two real answers:

1) This problem is not amenable to state action, because (reasons).

2) This is our plan to deal with the problem.

If you choose neither you effectively lose a default judgment, and those are hard to undo in the court of politics.

1.

https://twitter.com/viperwave/status/1668808500569575424

2.

https://twitter.com/lauren_wilford/status/1669062500048830465?cxt=HHwWgoCw9YXg2akuAAAA

One theory is that urban disorder represents, to a certain kind of young man, the idea of opportunity for physical adventure of the kind young men have always sought, and which seems otherwise unavailable now for various reasons. It is their idea of how to prove manhood.

https://twitter.com/turrible_tao/status/1668694961821196299

You can’t join the military because Our Kind Doesn’t Do that, and you won’t become a firefighter because there are class expectations around education, but you can tell yourself almost often enough to believe it that you proved something by living in a gritty, tough city.

Correct, she wants female attention for turning down male attention. This is as always about women competing with women and using men as a currency in which they keep score. What’s changed is that getting male attention used to be high-status; now rejecting it is.

https://twitter.com/MailOnline/status/1658495286518374402

This is not, ultimately, a negative on women in general- of course women are going to compete with women, as men compete with men (albeit in different ways). The problem is that we’ve elevated contempt, disgust, and lack of interest in each other as values to aspire to.

1.

https://twitter.com/oren_cass/status/1658576579390324736

2.

https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1658489870858457095

1.

https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1656062471810215937

2.

You refuse to use the words that describe your actual position because doing so marks you out as insufficiently radical, thus presumptively bigoted and worthless, within your own group, and expect everyone else to read your mind and save you from this social dilemma.

https://twitter.com/TanaGaneva/status/1656002559893536772

You also require them to carry the cost of your strategic ambiguity, both in being required to identify as “racist” by acknowledging your “real” meaning, and also of having to accept the risk of you changing mid-stream and deciding that actually you do mean “abolish.”

The rare reverse-Baldwin here, as an aging former player confuses a cylinder of blanks for live rounds.

https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1643745138978721792

Ted Kennedy, the last living link to Kennedy myth, died in office 14 years ago in 2009; it feels like 40. The last nationally elected Kennedy left office two years later in 2011, to little real notice. Generations have grown old since “The Kennedys” were a political focal point.

Two edges of a blade: So I got jumped yesterday in DTLA on my way to a job interview. From what I could make out the guy had decided that I was dressed too well and this had to mean I was LAPD, and “my cover was blown” so he was going to “cut my throat.” Anyway, he gave it a go and it didn’t work out.

The problem is that Biden and his circle do not conceive of their own legitimacy or the point of policy in terms of America as an actual nation, which they are quite upfront about. That what “America is an idea” is intended to convey- idealism in opposition to anything concrete.

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1643289347267911685

https://mobile.twitter.com/TheAgeofShoddy/status/1194000726453706753

Note that the latest changes mean that 75% of the “following” tab aren’t people you follow, which means both that you’re now probably not seeing most of the people you do follow and any attempt to fix this means you’re effectively censoring other people. Complete bullshit.

https://twitter.com/EdMorrissey/status/1642945313580228609

If this is just the way it’s going to be complete with the pointless humiliation ritual of screwing around with the logo, then the site just isn’t usable anymore. You can’t sift signal from noise or track news or keep in touch with people who have something valuable to say.

Looking at the current job market, every opening wants someone who has specialized in that area, whatever it is, for years. Part-time work at a hotel desk requires majoring in hotel management and 2+ years of experience. Everything is ossified, there’s very little flexibility. I’m half-afraid if I asked the guys at the local Subway how they got that gig they’d reveal that they went to a 4-year college for certified sandwich technicians, since that appears to be the level we’ve reached. How do you get around this? I can’t produce endless credentials.