The following applies to #Wars both real and perceived:

"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."
- Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 1758

#LoveHumanity
#FearlessMods

@GUYWITHBEER Hi, there. I was quoting The Economist. But I take your point about news reliability being iffy out there. No source is perfect. No person is unbiased. And there's no substitute for reading widely and being slow to form opinions.

@Graci You're a woman after my own heart.

We need better thinking about #China, folks.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/china-trap-us-foreign-policy-zero-sum-competition

Tom Nichols: "The real malady afflicting these men...is the deluge of narcissism in the modern world, especially among failed-to-launch young men whose injured grandiosity leads them to blame others for their own shortcomings and insecurities—and to seek revenge."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/lost-boys-violent-narcissism-angry-young-men/672886/

Here's a good analysis by RAND.

#GunViolence kills 120+ people every DAY in the U.S. It injures many more. No single approach will solve this problem alone. But we can all benefit from heeding science over myths from special interest groups and the politicians taking money from them.

#ReduceGunViolenceNow

https://www.rand.org/blog/2023/01/responding-to-the-firearm-violence-crisis-are-some.html

Little pet peeve:
Folks, we're in the digital age. Do news pubs really HAVE to keep prohibiting the Oxford comma in their copy? Even print publications should be able to handle it. We're not exactly dealing with moveable type presses anymore.
🙄🙄🙄
#OxfordCommasSaveLives

Our differences are smaller than we think, folks.

#FearlessMods

https://twitter.com/WillHurd/status/1619437608526041088

Inside the Slow Implosion of the Democratic Party's Vaunted Campaign Tech Firm

Loyal Democrats say layoffs at NGP VAN and EveryAction by the company’s new private equity owners (Apax Partners) could hobble the party.

https://theintercept.com/2023/01/24/layoffs-democratic-party-ngp-van/

Many months? At the earliest?

"Debate over the tanks was resolved in recent days with a compromise. The U.S. tanks — to be purchased from manufacturers rather than transferred from existing American military stockpiles — will not arrive in Ukraine for many months, at the earliest. Administration officials have emphasized that the M1s are part of long-range planning for Ukraine’s armed forces rather than weapons that will be put to immediate use."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/25/germany-leopard-tanks-abrams-ukraine/

Imagine incentivizing dignified political discourse.

Tami Pyfer's idea for a dignity index is awesome. If we can collectively make our politics more civilized (I'm guilty too), then maybe we can get better people willing to brave the headache of running and serving in public office. Candidate quality could improve. The influence of conspiracy theorists might recede. Political theater might, at least more often, give way to real governing.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/20/tami-pyfer-dignify-politics-00078409

"Taliban officials and supporters have begun to sign up to Twitter’s paid-for verification service, meaning blue tick marks appear on their accounts. For years Twitter has controversially allowed the Taliban to post on its site, though without an official-looking blue tick. By paying for Twitter Blue, which launched in December 2022, the jihadists may also benefit from priority ranking in search, mentions and replies."
The Economist WIB on 1/17/23
https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief

Good morning, everyone!

Today's my birthday. People are being nice. I'm grateful for all the good there is in this world. 💛

The meme from today's edition of The Fearless Moderate: "Why Religious Freedom and Marriage Equality Need Each Other"

Meme: "...you cannot cure discrimination with more discrimination."

Article here: https://fearlessmoderate.substack.com/p/why-religious-freedom-and-marriage

Attention media gatekeepers: "Just under a third of Americans think the news media has done a good job covering the 2022 midterm elections.

"Most Americans would like to see more descriptions of how policies would impact their communities, interviews with candidates, or summaries of candidate backgrounds and policy positions. Relatively few Americans are very interested in interviews with advocates or partisans, or analysis of the horse race coverage."

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/FiveThirtyEight-2022-midterm-election

"Interracial marriage rights, LGBTQ+ civil rights, and religious freedom would all inevitably be undermined by any failure to uphold the same constitutional principles."

https://fearlessmoderate.substack.com/p/why-religious-freedom-and-marriage

“I am not here to be loved and admired. It is not the duty of people to help me, but it is my duty to look after the world and the people in it.” —Janusz Korczak

What a good man.

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/service/janusz-korczak

@CIWS_35 Agreed. He's a gaslighter through and through.

"Trump’s technique has been to overwhelm his listeners with details — usually irrelevant details — to leave an impression of an election system that is highly suspicious and fraudulent."

And he's never going to give up that technique. Ever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/01/truth-about-election-fraud-its-rare/