Oh, I’m sorry. It’s one of the hardest things. And I’m not saying humans are bad, or anything categorical like that. Just that we’re a long way from perfect and probably always will be. I don’t want to judge the whole thing based on what humans do. We can be magnificent, and less so. 
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Talenti dark chocolate, for me!
Kate, It may be meaningful to take a look at Students For Fair Housing v Harvard. I’m told the plaintiffs (supported by conservative activists) take the opposite approach to Congressional authorization of individual rights of action (as compared to their approach to the Marion County Health litigation.
Denys Davidov and Operator Starsky are the Ukrainians that I keep up with. Also Perun which is a podcast from an Australian navy logistics specialist who takes it to the literal nuts and bolts.
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Couldn’t get him up the elevator to see the view? I expect something will find him at ground level.
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Looks like Rudy Flatula has been flouting the law. He’s been declared in contempt because he did not show up in court. I suppose he thought that he did not have to since he longer had a law license.
Spot on, arrendis, about cynicism v. pessimism. For over 40 years I, an optimist by disposition (it has nothing to do with intelligence or not being depressive – I figure “disposition” is vague enough to work), have lived with a pessimist (also not a depressive, and he is very intelligent) who is not at all cynical. As a pessimist who is not a cynic, he tends to dwell on worst-case scenarios, but since he is not cynical, he is also an activist who works to avert those scenarios. As an optimist, I work to do so, too, but with less intensity than he does yet with visions of the better world we all might create together. I guess it takes all kinds. I mean, it does take all kinds to get things done, working in concert, however messily. Maybe even cynics have a place in this takes-all-kinds world (so my optimistic disposition leads me to think).
I don’t know how many times, at loggerheads with my husband over stuff about children or finances, I have quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “A coward dies a thousand deaths, a hero dies but once.” My pessimist-not-a-cynic husband has easily died a thousand deaths but somehow has been revived to fight another battle, while I-the-optimist still await being accorded my status as hero.
Life is grand!
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The U.S. government of the time was not eager to pay the political costs of facilitating an influx of Jews. It was political calculation callously dooming people to the camps, a thing that was understood among the relevant officials. We do it now. These people who walk here from Mexico, from Guatemala, from all over the vast areas south of us, they’re desperate and they have nowhere else to go. But we’re in a place now where we openly doom our own citizens to an agonizing death for political expediency. We say Aunt Betsy should wish to die, to keep the economy humming. Words fail.
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I know campaigning is part of the candidacy, but candidates also have policy positions and experience unless they’re Andrew Yang. Hillary’s policy positions and experience made her a great candidate, and I believe the number of people who believed in positions but didn’t vote for her because she didn’t visit Wisconsin enough would have been pretty low.
I’ve yet to finish the essay, but a writer in the latest Harper’s says changing the SCOTUS could come back to bite us in unintended ways.
they’re desperate and they have nowhere else to go.
The parallels with us turning away shiploads of Jews in '39 and '42(?) are heart-rending.
ETA: One refugee MAY have been a German spy and “threat to national security” was the excuse we manufactured to turn them away. Then we locked up Japanese Americans.
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Back in the 70s when my father in law was still on this side of the grass, he told me that GOPers were always bastards serving only the rich. He never ran for office but knew the politics of the 20s and 30s.
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Now and then some essayist will reference “the tragic view of life”. I presume we all take that view – and whatever that view means to us – in one way or another as we age.
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Well, I tend to think it has whatever meaning we might assign to it, but only that. And of course everyone dies. If that’s the tragic view, I certainly share it. Not in the emotional sense of the world, but inherently absurd, and I’ve never as a thinking person suspected otherwise.
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And sometimes called the existential view of life. Don’t know if people still read Camus.
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Well, I did, as a young nerd.
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Joseph Campbell, often quite articulate regarding “the human condition”, once offered the following, shortly before his death:
“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what’s going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends."
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Way back in high school my English teacher Mrs Rhodes, close to retirement, said once that old age reconciles one with death. I recall thinking that I would fully appreciate that someday.
That someday has long since arrived.
Love the Campbell quote. Chris Hitchens says the party continues after we’ve left it.
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