Matthew Burdette, Is The Church Obsolete?:

Famously, the essay in which the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her conversion—the authenticity of which I do not doubt —focused on the role that Christianity plays in Western civilization. But one should be clear-eyed about this matter. If the point of Christianity is the survival of the West, then Christianity may be treated as a useful fiction or a necessary evil alongside things like police forces and the military. The place of Jesus in such a Christianity is clear: he is a mascot, a long-dead victim of Roman imperialism and religious zealotry whom we invoke when we need a symbol, so that we may display him for all to see, pinned to the cross by our highest values and current political aspirations.

Dave Farquhar: “It was 61 years ago, on November 18, 1963, that the push button telephone, or touch tone phone, was first introduced.”

Bluesky is a continuation of the idea that long threads are a good idea rather than a single blog post. In my opinion multiple paragraph threads read better and last better as blog posts, making a platform like micro.blog so much better.

I think the 2024 holiday shopping season could be one of the biggest ever, because smart U.S. consumers will expect prices to rise next year due to Trump’s tariffs. Many will get richer in the next six months, but soon after reality will kick in with a recession that likely becomes a depression. The Republicans in office now and those to come in are no smarter than the ones in 1929.

If Trump were really smart he would make Social Security solvent forever. Doing so would eliminate a political weapon in the manner of how Democrats and Republicans used abortion as a political weapon. I doubt Trump will do this because Republicans like using the threat to Social Security to the same extent as Democrats. Protecting Social Security would be extremely popular and would tremendously improve Trump’s legacy.

Looks like there is new energy around moving off of Twitter to another social network, and this time the more appealing destination is Bluesky. You can find me on Bluesky and the majority of my posts there of their home here. I only occasionally drop in on Bluesky and Mastodon and micro.blog is my most often viewed feed.

I think we ought to start a discussion about what it means to be a patriot in the United States. Such a discussion should be like Civics lessons about the purposes of the U.S. Constitution. In my opinion, equating patriotism to loyalty to any President, or frankly political party, is counter to the purpose of the U.S. Constitution.

Time to brush up on the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution. We ought to also consider how the SCOTUS Citizens United decision enabled the billionaire class to buy this past Presidential election.

Cory Doctorow:

Our identities are complex and ever-shifting, and men who worry that women’s power comes at their own expense, or whites who worry that this is true of Black and Latino power aren’t entirely wrong. As the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

But there’s one part of your identity that is inherently solidaristic: whether you are a worker or an owner. If you own the business, you make more money when your workers earn less. If you work at the business, every dollar you earn is a dollar your boss doesn’t get. Workers' gains are bosses' losses.

That’s why they want us to “vote with our wallets.” It’s not just that those votes are rigged for the people with the fattest wallets. By tricking you into thinking of yourself as a “consumer” who benefits from low prices, they get you to stop thinking of yourself as a worker who suffers from low wages.

Emphasis added. I tend to agree that focus on prices can be a redirection away from wages, and that is compounded by the fact that increased prices do also lead to increased profit margins. Consequently, inflation can be a win-win for many CEOs, at best it enables very lazy or uninspiring people to run companies, at worst it enables them to be come very, very rich.

I appreciate and recommend Dave Roger’s post on and about Veterans Day.

Ann Wilison Schaef, When Society Becomes An Addict:

The context of our elephant—our society—is the fact that the system in which we live is an addictive system. It has all the characteristics and exhibits all the processes of the individual alcoholic or addict. It functions in precisely the same ways. To say the society is an addictive system is not to condemn the society, just as an intervention with an alcoholic does not condemn the alcoholic.

You might hear those who identify as Christian say that in Christ we are free, but they often leave the “free from what” unsaid. These Christians will say sin, but I don’t think they really know. I would like to suggest that in this book Ann Willson Schaef describes exactly that from which the Way of Christ sets us free.

Addicts and their families live from crisis to crisis. Every event or issue is perceived as a major turning point, and one barely ends when the next one begins.

The God of the Addictive System, who is the God that religion teaches and who in truth has little in common with the God of the Old and New Testaments, is God the Controller. It follows, then, that if it is possible to be God as defined by that system, one must try to control everything, and we do!

I feel the need to re-post this quote because given the result of the Presidential election I think people need to be reminded that the purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to restrain power and not give power.

The worst cost of factions comes when they capture the state for rent-seeking—for the purpose of directing the state’s power for the benefit of themselves, and for the exploitation and even the oppression of others. But because this problem is “sown” in human nature, which is permanent, so, too, is the problem. Hence there can be no end—no conceivable end—to the need to limit government by circumscribing its powers that can be captured by factions. This is true even—actually, especially—when the power of the state is wielded in response to a majority faction

The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will (emphasis added)

Pretty much sums it up, from The Atlantic:

In the national exit polls, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme.” But about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway’a striking measure of their willingness to risk an uncertain future over an unacceptable present.

Four years ago: How Trump changed America. About 73 million Americans decided they want more Trump. About 13 million Americans, which is the gap between the votes that Biden got (81 million) and Harris (approximately 68 million) got decided protesting is more important than the risk of a Trump presidency. Trump won about 74 million votes in 2020, so basically the same number of people voted for him this time, that doesn’t look to me like more undecided swung to Trump but rather people who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. Protesting feels good but in this way doesn’t produce whatever is the desired result, it will not result in a change in the number of parties and it certainly will not result in the stopping of what is happening in Gaza. Of course it’s your right to protest.

First thought was to why, there is a difference between expecting people to tolerate something and expecting them to comply. I think a lot of people feel that they are being told to comply on a lot of cultural issues they don’t agree to. Further, being told to comply is to them anti-democratic, so I suspect the majority of people who voted believe they voted for democracy.

Why is it that a Presidential election is such a big deal? The President is intended to be the administrator of a government, faithfully executing the laws enacted by Congress. By design, and literally by name, the House of Representatives is most representative of you as an individual, so how come the Congressional elections are not bigger? SCOTUS has literally told us, in its immunity decision, that Congress is the only branch of government that can hold Presidential power in check. Do you realize that had the Senate and House had a different mix of Democrats and Republicans that this whole Presidential election would be different? All of the things that either Presidential candidate claims to do cannot be done without a law or assistance of Congress.

Finally, Democracy is not defined by the existence of elections, nations not considered democratic hold elections. What defines democracy is how the results of the elections are treated. Democracy exists when it’s accepted that an election has a winner and a loser, before AND after the election takes place.

One of the reasons why extremism is so effective in American politics is that many people cast their votes based on feelings rather than history, such as what a person did when they were in office, or policy, or what the candidates say they will do. Consequently elections are popularity contests and not job interviews. The whole point of campaign rallies is to stir emotions, to “fire up” the base. What exactly is the base? History has shown the consequence of elections based emotions rather than actions.

The problem with extremism is not only that for some it creates enemies but also that for a large group of people it creates knee jerk reactions against. For these people, anything that sounds extreme to them is to not be believed or at least not react to. In my view, these are people like the frog in the warm water that doesn’t jump out as the temperature increases to boiling. All of this is by design to get us either fighting against each other or to take no action.

I think the following quote sums up my position on Harris v. Trump, and I like the entire Atlantic article in which it was written:

If the country is inching toward a more pro-Palestinian stance, the struggle will take place within the Democratic Party. Harris is movable. Who among the Republicans will put pressure on Trump to care about Palestinians? Tom Cotton? Marco Rubio? Stephen Miller?

I understand why people who have a strong dislike for the U.S. Federal government, and want to see it blown up, vote for Trump because there is high probability he will provide the result they desire. However, for every other desired outcome, I think the probability is higher with Democrats in office than Republicans.

Even the most democratic of rights, the right to protest, is most probable of being defended by Democrats than Republicans.