November 2023 Roundup: From Love's Radical Rebellion to the Depths of Political Power

“The ethical imperative to love not only friends but enemies is a related challenge. The person who loves those who love them is managing only what is natural. But the person who can return hatred with love is in the vanguard of changing the world.

Again, this happens not because love seeks to impose its view on others. Rather, it seeks the transformation of all by holding out for a different dynamic to break in. When that happens, this-worldly power structures are suspended. There can become present a freedom that is open and startling, a liberty to love what is transformative and so be readied to risk all for it. Such love is willing to die, not so as better to kill, but as a mark of complete devotion and tremendous trust.”

The animals are rising, haha.

"The way I define the American Gospel... we've exchanged a Biblical gospel that exalts Jesus above everything in this world for an American gospel that prostitutes Jesus for the sake of comfort, power, politics, and prosperity in our country." - David Platt

“Upon the cross Jesus does not epitomize or announce the Kingdom of God in any way. He becomes the concentrated reality of everything that stands against it.”

“Polls show that the views of Democrats and Republicans on the state of the economy immediately flipped after the 2016 election, before there was even time for the actual economy to change very much.”

“The internet… democratized information sharing all over the world. There are no more “gatekeepers”. Because less that 10% of the world’s population is truly WEIRD, the internet has made conspiracy theories the dominant epistemic style of the 21st century.”

“I doubt whether I’ll live along enough to see another president who is generally accepted as legitimate.”

“PS. Think about the bizarre coincidence that there’s almost a 100% correlation between people who believe an election was stolen and those who support the losing candidate. If you think that correlation is weird, then you are probably WEIRD. If you think that correlation is not in the least surprising, then you are probably not WEIRD.”

What do neo-nazis means when they say the Holocaust didn't happen?

They mean they would like for it to happen again.

When you deny a specific crime that people with whom you identify carried out in the past, you're affirming that crime.”

“For MacIntyre, contemporary liberalism, heavily influenced by the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, is far too concerned with managing threats, internal and external, from its perceived enemies rather than advancing a positive vision of the common good. The limitation of this perspective is that, as Perreau-Saussine neatly puts it, “by keeping only to the perspective of what is evil, we run the risk of dangerously narrowing our range of vision.”

The utter moral and intellectual poverty of Republicans. Crazy people are running our country in serious times. Let’s fire them.

"By dwelling so extensively on the violence and vandalism, they say, this congressional inquiry somehow failed the American people, whose attention should have been directed to the inconsequential banalities that also occurred on that day… The fact that millions of Americans brushed their teeth and walked their dogs on December 7, 1941, doesn’t undermine the horror of Pearl Harbor. Footage of the 9/11 hijackers uneventfully navigating though airport security doesn’t dilute the terrorism they would later commit…. At root, the effort to convince voters that they cannot trust their own eyes exposes MAGA supporters’ troubled consciences. Somewhere deep down, they understand that January 6 is a political weakness for which they must compensate. The fact that they’re going about that imperative in the dumbest ways imaginable is illustrative of the scale of that challenge."

Let the cognitive dissonance do its work and get off the Trump train to hell.

"Following Jesus and trusting his victory over death, and his vindication into resurrection life and claiming that future and identity is absolutely crucial to gaining victory over the dragon in [our] life.

One way to think about the sermon on the mount is beginning to wean yourself off of the ways of the dragon.

It's very difficult, but actually living that way becomes a live option if [our] fear of death is no longer the biggest motivator in [our] life."

"You set up a worldview in which the sort of true believers are pitted against the [wishy-washy] fans.

The way you sort them out is by increasingly extreme lies. And the lies you buy into have some social costs outside of the movement.

So if you are one of the people who said, yes, this was the biggest crowd on inauguration day back on January 20th, 2017, that was the first lie. And they got much, much crazier over time.

People make their identity part of this member only group and they signal it.

Because they've bought into so many crazy lies and so much outlandish behavior, the breaking point becomes much higher. It becomes impossible for someone to jump ship. The cost it raises is so high, it creates cohesion."

“Then, there’s the power of cognitive dissonance: if you didn’t break with Trump over, say, January 6th, then every other transgression seems comparatively minor—and you’d have to admit that you were wrong, for years, in order to reposition yourself politically.

It’s less mentally taxing to just keep supporting him, no matter what.”

“misinformation persists precisely because knowingness shields a person from learning.

There are two distinct subsets of knowingness in modern society.

Type 1: People who think they know but they don’t; and

Type 2: People who don’t want to know.”

"I believe that next year's US elections will be the most important in our lifetimes because their results will lead to either

a) dysfunctional fighting that will take us over the edge or

b) smart bipartisan leadership that will manage these challenges capably. ...

1) There is only one path to successful leadership in the United States and that is for there to be strong, smart, bipartisan leadership that works against the extremists to pull the country together and make major reforms to the system so that it works well for most Americans.

...

"The Republicans Replacing Trump with a Strong Candidate Who Can Work across Party Lines - Nikki Haley is the most likely contender and I believe she fits the bill because she is very smart, very practical, has a great moral compass, and can work well across party lines."

...

"The Democrats Replacing Biden with a Strong Candidate Who Can Work across Party Lines - there are already five contenders who are jockeying for position, one or two who would fit the bill of being reasonably smart, practical, and inclined to work well across party lines."

...

"So, in conclusion, while the odds are still in favor of a Trump-Biden rematch, I believe there is now a significant rising possibility that we will get the sort of smart bipartisan leadership that is needed and that most Americans want."

“the MAGA base loves him, not Trump’s policies. That’s why they can chant “Build the Wall!” until they’re blue in the face, but then not really care that he didn’t. And they’re in so deep that it will take more than a lukewarm midterm election to break the spell he has over those voters who slap stickers of Trump riding an eagle in a Superman outfit on their pickup trucks.

The successful despots have learned a key lesson: if you make politics a devotional cult to one individual, and steadily increase the costs of abandoning that movement, then you can survive the inevitably choppy waters produced by incompetence. Trump understood this logic and exploited it.”