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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Just because there are a few thousand people who still worship Norse gods doesn’t mean the religion is thriving.

    Yes, they’re still making noise. If anything, they’re making more noise than ever. But public sentiment is against them by a wide majority. Even a majority of Republican voters favor gay rights along with female reproductive rights. What we’re seeing is the impact of a minority imposing its will on the majority, and it cannot last.

    They’re the dog that caught the car, but they can’t keep it.






  • It’s not like new culture wars won’t be started and fought just the same. But there was a time when slavery was the topic of a fierce culture war in the US, and it wasn’t resolved until it broke out into a literal war. Now, nearly two hundred years later, it’s still unacceptable to suggest that people who look different are better off as property rather than people. Even Florida’s attempts to whitewash Southern slavery doesn’t go so far as to blame the slaves weren’t people.

    They’ve lost this culture war, just as they lost the fight for slavery and later to keep the population segregated. They’ll try again in time, but for the moment, the question of abortion and homosexual rights is largely settled at a cultural level. The conservatives lost, and that’s why they’ve largely moved on to nitpicking the definition of gender and trying (unsuccessfully) to defend their legal victories on women’s reproductive rights.










  • That still doesn’t make this a black and white situation. Would Israel be able to get away with selling their atrocities to the Israeli people if Hamas weren’t dedicated to doing the same to Israel? If the Palestinian government had been willing to accept compromise forty to fifty years ago, would Israel have been able to do what they’ve done?

    The answer, of course, is no. No one’s hands are clean. And there’s really no easy solution that doesn’t violate ethics because we’re on the outside looking to force solutions on them. Just like they’re doing to each other. If we abandon Israel, then they’ll suffer what they’ve done to the Palestinians, and the Israeli people don’t deserve that any more than the Palestinians. You can’t tell me you have a better solution because you don’t.





  • It would be nice if the world was so easily divided into black and white, but it isn’t. Politics is complicated, and the actions of the Israeli government are not the actions or even the will of the Israeli people. Israel deserves to exist, and so does Palestine. Acknowledging the rights of both people doesn’t negate condemnation of what either government has done in violation of human rights.

    Trying to walk that middle line between their right to exist and disavowing their actions is harder than you think. You think it ought to be easy, except for the people who think differently from you and insist that the opposite solution you want is the only acceptable path.

    We don’t have the privilege of knowing everything about the situation. Trying to drive from the back seat isn’t helpful.