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Every Conversation Between Every Parent and Their Child After One Year of College

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/every-conversation-between-every-parent-and…
Created
Fri, 31/05/2024 - 02:33

PARENT 1: Welcome home!

CHILD: Manipulative!

PARENT 1: Wait. What?

CHILD: Toxic!

PARENT 1: Who? Me?

CHILD: Narcissist!

PARENT 1: You keep saying words, but without verbs.

CHILD: Gaslighting!

PARENT 1: I’m just thinking that if you put these words into a sentence, I might get a better sense of what’s on your mind.

CHILD: You’re a manipulative, toxic narcissist!

PARENT 1: Me? How?

CHILD: Ah! See? Gaslighting!

PARENT 1: Okay, I feel like you’ve learned some new words at school, and now you’re just cycling through them without any context or evidence. Maybe you’re hungry. Would you like a sandwich? I’m making sandwiches.

CHILD: Manipulative! Toxic! Gaslight!

PARENT 1: You forgot narcissist.

Turning Out The Anti-MAGA Majority

https://digbysblog.net/2024/05/30/turning-out-the-anti-maga-majority/
Created
Fri, 31/05/2024 - 00:30
A cure for Turnout Terror On Wednesday, I pointed to a posting at The Ink calling for Democrats to tell a better story. Facts without context aren’t as “sticky” as a good story. Facts matter. College graduates, children of the Enlightenment, built their educations and their livelihoods around them. But like your SAT or GRE scores, nobody gives a damn about them later in life. What does your job experience say about you? What story does it tell? The play’s the thing that will catch the conscience of disaffected voters, writes Michael Podhorzer at Weekend Reading. A key point in Part I of his analysis:  Disaffected voters cast ballots when they believe that if the other party wins, they will lose the freedoms they now take for granted – whether it’s the freedom to own an AR-15 or to have access to reproductive health services.  Podhorzer addresses presidential polling showing “young voters and voters of color” moving away from Biden: That has led to what I’ll call “turnout terror,” the idea that high turnout levels in November will spell doom for Biden.

The Steady State Economy Act: Halfway to the Hill?

https://steadystate.org/the-steady-state-economy-act-halfway-to-the-hill/
Created
Thu, 30/05/2024 - 23:46
by Brian Czech

Promulgating the steady state economy via federal legislation has long been a primary goal at CASSE. However, even a primary goal isn’t necessarily pursued from the get-go. Much of the CASSE run thus far has been focused on raising awareness of the need for a steady state economy. Raising such awareness was even higher on the list of goals, because drafting statutory law is of limited use if there is no knowledge of the need for it.

The post The Steady State Economy Act: Halfway to the Hill? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide

https://tomdispatch.com/you-cant-turn-back-the-clock-on-genocide/
Created
Thu, 30/05/2024 - 23:33

As Amal Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should have been celebrating her infant’s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear, surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her family had experienced for months. “I was muttering to myself, ‘I hope I die,'” she recalled. Though gut-wrenching, Amal’s story is not unlike those of so many other young mothers in Gaza today. The... Read more

Source: You Can’t Turn Back the Clock on Genocide appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Too Much Bleach

https://digbysblog.net/2024/05/30/too-much-bleach/
Created
Thu, 30/05/2024 - 23:00
Or too much Kool-Aid? Seeing Trump cultists break down in tears over their authoritarian master facing justice was as disconcerting as it was disheartening. While some may feel the need to mock them for their Trumpish idolatry, I feel sorry for them. Pity may indeed smite them worse than mockery. Mockery feels like oppression, and oppression reinforces faith. It is best to remember, as Jenny Cohn and even Tony Perkins pointed out, that the Trump cult attracts the fringiest of the fringe, the sort of people who in another decade might relocate to Jonestown or opt for phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding. They are loud. They get press. But they are not many. Until America’s Most Corrupted, those MAGA Republicans who’ve latched onto Trump in pursuit of personal power, succeed in burying our democracy to replace it with Gilead, we will still count votes on Election Day. Remember that. While reminding Black voters in Philadelphia what he’s done for them, President Biden reminded them what Trump would have done to them had Black Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol. Your vote still counts. Use it.

Family Tours in the Kingdom of the Sick: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Patient Portal

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the…
Created
Thu, 30/05/2024 - 23:00

When COVID struck Rebecca Saltzman’s family, the virus unmasked a life-changing discovery: her husband and two of their kids had genetic heart disease. The kind where people drop dead. As their healthy wife and mother, Saltzman had a new role too—guiding her family through what Susan Sontag called the Kingdom of the Sick. In this column, she’ll explore the anthropological strangeness of this new place, the mysteries of the body, and how facing death distills life into its purest form: funny, terrifying, and sublime.

All My Exes Are Dating Each Other

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/all-my-exes-are-dating-each-other
Created
Thu, 30/05/2024 - 22:00

They found one another. Of course they did. It doesn’t matter how. Fate finds a way.

I see some of them sunglass-faced sitting outside of cafés laughing over espressos, playfully touching elbows. I know they’re whispering about me after they make love—two heads on one pillow, tracing the chin of the other.

Another two pair up, vacation across Italy together, and pose for pics in front of beautiful sunsets and seas stretching into horizons. They look so happy because they are. Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they be? They have nothing in common but me—and that’s all the bond they seem to need.

A couple of my exes find another couple of my exes and double-date. Those four find another four, those eight another eight. This goes on—a big bang of sorts, a chain reaction. My multiple pasts expand exponentially into a future, coalescing. The gravity sinks in. There are larger dinner parties, planned camping trips. They meet parents, exchange holiday gifts, celebrate birthdays.

The Revival Of Anti-Semitism By Israel And Its Defenders

https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/niyBMplQItCTUnioXAy3BHKSkciKEY1s
Created
Thu, 30/05/2024 - 20:18
The Revival Of Anti-Semitism By Israel And Its Defenders

Anti-semitism has been over-stated and used as a political weapon for generations now. It became beyond the pale after World War II and has stayed that way in the West and America. This isn’t to say there weren’t anti-semites, but they were powerless and damn near meaningless.

But that is changing, and it is going to keep changing. The problem is the constant use of the charge of anti-semitism itself to ward of criticisms of mass-murder, child killing, and other crimes by Israel in Palestine.

Israel wraps itself in the cloak of “we are Jews” to justify its crimes.

The distinction between Israeli, Zionist and Jewish isn’t being blurred most dangerously by Israel’s enemies, but by Israel itself.

And the intellectual propaganda is making it worse.

Avoiding people because of what you suspect they might think

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/05/30/avoiding-people-because-of-what-you-suspec…
Created
Thu, 30/05/2024 - 19:40
Something that’s bothered me for a while is the relationship between politics and friendship. Not just close friendship but also people who you are happy to hang out with socially. Some topics – I’d include Brexit, trans rights and Israel/Palestine – are especially divisive in that people who disagree on these seem to find it […]