1/ Like I said last night, @julieingersoll's book "Building God's Kingdom" is perhaps one of the most important books of the past decade. goodreads.com/book/show/2346… 2/ I'm very interested in an update, perhaps a second book on how the Christian Reconstruction movement has further entrenched itself in American culture, especially as support for Christian Nationalism on the far-right grows.

1/ This edition of the Dinner Table Digest is brought to you by my recent interest in online speech, thanks in part to the class that I am auditing at the University of Waterloo - of course Musk’s purchase of Twitter also factors in to my recent thinking. pfthurley.substack.com/p/echo-chamber… 2/ Today’s first piece was assigned to the class to read, a Aeon Magazine revision of a much more technical academic article.

1/ I have to say, @julieingersoll's 2015 book on the Christian Reconstructionism movement was more than prescient. goodreads.com/book/show/2346… Here's a passage on the why behind anti-abortion personhood amendments: 2/ "Reconstructionists claim that when the civil government overreaches its legitimate biblical authority, the right to resist it is rooted in the authority of God.

I was on Twitter before bed last night, and it took me to a dark place. I realized two things:
1. A fascist Christian Nationalism (CN) is likely to become the dominant political perspective in North America.
2. Progressives are entirely unprepared to counter the coming threat. Let me explain the second point - many others far more knowledgeable than I can explain the first. Having lived in the past as a conservative Christian, holding to a type of CN without even knowing it, I can tell you that progressives have a very shallow

Reading these comments reminds me how little most people know about the internal lives of religious people; I'd argue that the psychological motivations for theocratic fascism are found in genuinely and firmly held beliefs about in/out group dynamics.

reddit.com/r/texas/commen… There's a widespread belief among progressives that theocratic fascists like the Texas GOP specifically <want> to keep people marginalized in order to maintain and further benefit the power of the white, wealthy, male, status quo.
reddit.com/r/texas/commen…

Prompted by a friend and sex educator in rural Illinois, I was curious about how easy it was to access affirming information on sex and gender in the public library system in #Saskatchewan. I thought I'd start off easy, and search simply for the classic "Our Bodies, Ourselves." Searching through the Parkland Library system (Yorkton), the results shocked me. These were the first three results. The first title is a book on getting sober; the second is a holistic health book, and the third is a book on the big tech hijacking of the mind and body.

1/ "The next day the separations began—Oleh was called to join 13 other men on a large Ilyushin-76 transport plane; Dima was not. 2/ He had a brief chance to say goodbye—worried about Dima’s state of mind, he checked to make sure his son remembered his name, address, and phone number—and asked some of the other prisoners to look out for him. vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/b…

Answers are more about the questions you ask than anything else. These days, asking difficult questions is paradoxically seen as weak, and a YouTube University™️ degree is often taken over the advice & wisdom of experts w/ years of training in asking those difficult questions.

https://twitter.com/kev_in_the_shed/status/1420755695876542474

Folks have spent years learning how to ask good questions using critical thinking skills that have taken thousands of readings and discussions and experiments to hone. Then, when we ask them what they've come up with, we balk at the answers we're given, cuz they don't conform to

1/ I know the feeling of losing your cognitive edge after a major health crisis... thelancet.com/journals/eclin… 2/ "People who had recovered from COVID-19, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits versus controls when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group, pre-existing medical disorders, tiredness,…

"But the most dangerous effect of the exhaustion steadily gaining on all engaged in the fight against the epidemic did not consist in their relative indifference to outside events and the feelings of others, but in the slackness and supine-ness that they allowed to invade their personal lives. They developed a tendency to shirk every movement that didn't seem absolutely necessary or called for efforts that seemed too great to be worth while. Thus these men were led to break, oftener and oftener, the rules of hygiene they themselves had instituted,