Fluid ImaginationFrom How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election:
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.
From It’s not ‘polarization.’ We suffer from Republican radicalization:
While it’s true that the country is more deeply divided along partisan lines than it has been in the past, it is wrong to suggest a symmetrical devolution into irrational hatred. The polarization argument too often treats both sides as equally worthy of blame, characterizing the problem as a sort of free-floating affliction (e.g., “lack of trust”). This blurs the distinction between a Democratic Party that is marginally more progressive in policy positions than it was a decade ago, and a Republican Party that routinely lies, courts violence, and seeks to define America as a White Christian nation.
From Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+:
A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most.
From One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia:
[H]istory is an edit war. Truth, factual and moral, hangs in the balance.
From The Death of White America Has Been Greatly Exaggerated:
During a rant about what he perceived as left-wing giddiness over the “extinction of white people,” [FOX News commentator, Tucker Carlson] asked, “Where did all these people go?” The millions of missing white Americans did not, in fact, go anywhere. And they are not being replaced by minorities. Growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren. Others were recategorized in 2020 as multiracial themselves, instead of single-race white.
In other words, White America is only going extinct if you maintain the illusory violence of the “one drop rule.“
From Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’:
[The authors make] the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.
One of the authors, David Graeber, wrote one of my favorite nonfiction books, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and I can’t wait to get my hands on this one.
From The Mystery of Why Our Ancestors Left Africa:
“Homo erectus is one of the most successful human species to have ever lived,” [says the paleoanthropologist Andy Herries, of La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia]. “It seemingly evolved 2 million years ago, and if the recent dates from Indonesia are correct, it was still around 108,000 years ago.”