Wertheimer

The philosophy and psychology of why people have more of a problem with "preachiness" or "stridency" than they do with genocide.

This essay's also of interest to anyone learning more about double consciousness or the costs of autistic masking.

A modest first step will be to recognise that the eyeroll heuristic is deeply unreliable. The fact that some new norm strikes us as annoying, or that those advancing it strike us as self-righteous, preachy or otherwise offputting, tells us nothing about whether the norm is an improvement or not, whether it represents moral progress or moral backslide. The negative-experience of affective friction caused by the new norm isn’t evidence that the norm itself is bad or that we shouldn’t adopt it. Reactions involving awkwardness, irritation, even resentment are precisely what we should expect even in cases where old, unjust norms are being replaced with new, fairer ones. These feelings have their roots in norm psychology. And though they are very much a reflection of the genuine challenges of adapting to new and changing social environments, they are not sensitive to the merits of moral arguments or the moral value of different social norms. Far from it: our norm psychology helps us track and adapt to whatever norms happen to structure the social interactions in our communities and cultures. And, crucially, it does this regardless of whether those norms and conventions are just or unjust, harmful or beneficial, serious or silly.

Never forget

https://archive.is/MLLyS

For years, Hexbearians have wondered - "Who is the type of guy who has supported Trump for years, but will refuse to do so a bad paperwork conviction?"

A New York Times/Siena College Poll study of nearly 2,000 voters found modest good news for Mr. Biden. While the vast majority of people had not changed their position on the two men, more voters moved away from Mr. Trump than toward him.

Follow-up interviews with these post-verdict switchers offer a window into the minds of still-persuadable Americans.

The best they can do -

1. A small business tyrant who's pro-choice and doesn't seem to have voted for Trump in the past (he may now go for RFK Jr.)

2. A tech guy who voted against Trump twice but is pissed at Biden for not forgiving student loans

3. Someone who "volunteers with people trying to rebuild their lives from addiction and prison sentences" and never would have voted for Trump in the first place (but may still vote for Biden despite the genocide)

4. An account executive who voted for Biden but "watched Mr. Biden perform the job as president and could not envision voting for him again."

SHANGHAI—In an offer promoted heavily on banner ads across the internet, Chinese e-commerce platform Temu began selling Uyghur Muslims for $1.49 each this week. “The special price available during this lightning deal will lower the barrier to Uyghur ownership for consumers everywhere,” a Temu spokesperson told reporters, confirming that more than 100,000 of the subjugated ethnic and religious minorities from the Xinjiang region had been sold so far on the discount marketplace. “You won’t find prices on forced laborers this low anywhere else. When we tell our customers to ‘shop like a billionaire,’ we mean it.” Approximately 90% of Temu users reached for comment complained that the Uyghur laborers they had purchased arrived in such damaged condition that they no longer worked.

Quite a beginning:

When my parents moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974, they were young idealists trying to foment Marxist revolution.

Having kids and getting a mortgage mellowed their radical views substantially, but I still grew up marinating in progressive ideas. One such idea was that nationalism was a great evil that had caused Germans to hate and murder all of my mother’s aunts and uncles in Poland. Another idea was that private schools should not exist, a noble notion which lasted until we realized I was going to finish the math offerings at our small-town New Hampshire public high school before starting ninth grade. That’s how I ended up at Phillips Exeter.

Naturally, it was the insufferably anti-colonialist atmosphere of Oxford that changed this guy's course.

It was at Oxford, after having one too many chats over a glass of port with a fellow Oxonian who seemed way too interested in the Jewish influence on the American political process, that something shifted in me. The place was so fully blanketed by the fumes of post-colonial theory that Zionism (and its inherent criminality) was a constant subject, which made me wonder more deeply about it all.

Which leads us to:

Ben Yochai witnessed the Roman annihilation of Judea. He understood that the way your enemy fights a war affects the definition of the righteous way to fight back. In other words, his recommendation was calibrated to the assumption that if the Jews are fighting a war, then their own future survival (and flourishing) is a nonnegotiable goal of the war. Thus, a Jew living by the Torah and confronted with an enemy armed with a human shield must ask: What does God want me to do now, given what I face? And how might I figure that out by studying the Torah?

As Abraham learns when arguing with God about Sodom, the ultimate decision about who lives and who perishes in calamity is the Creator’s choice, and while you can plead with God to spare the righteous, you must also have the moral humility to trust that He knows what He’s doing.

Thus:

Instead of bragging about the extra danger our soldiers experience for the sake of sparing enemy noncombatants, we should reject the premise that we Jews bear any responsibility for protecting the human shields employed by our enemy.

. . .

If our own, unsurpassably subtle ethical tradition guides us to these policies, then it is only our lingering ideological subjugation to the Western tradition that makes them seem scandalous. Like the Jew among nations, Israel constantly struggles with its half-successful attempt to blend in with the crowd and pretend to be a member like any other, and it is time to put an end to this paralyzing charade. We did not stick to our Law through 3,000 years of human civilization to continue national life as the perpetual defendant. It is our job to know that Law, to teach what we know—and, most of all, to live by it.

From the author of:

As the nation finally turns to the difficult work of doing with Amalek what our Creator has long been asking of us, we can be newly confident He is with us.

About the Author Jeremy England is physicist, biologist, and machine learning researcher who also has received ordination as an orthodox rabbi. Previously a physics professor at MIT, he now resides in Israel and loves exploring the Torah’s commentaries on scientific reasoning.

:brump:

President Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday allowing him to temporarily seal the U.S. border with Mexico to migrants when crossings surge, a move that would suspend longtime protections for asylum seekers in the United States.

. . .

The order would represent the single most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any modern Democrat, and echoes a 2018 effort by President Donald J. Trump to block migration that was assailed by Democrats and blocked by federal courts.

This is the guy who 100% didn't realize he was playing a parody of himself in the opening scene of Tár.

Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

. . .

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

https://www.theonion.com/comedians-in-cars-getting-crucified-1851496256

Mr. Biden, whose team helped hammer out the deal, urged support for it on Monday in a statement from Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, that said, “We strongly support this legislation and call on every senator to put partisan politics aside and vote to secure the border.”

Among other changes to immigration law, the measure would make it more difficult to gain asylum in the United States and increase detentions and deportations of those crossing into the country without authorization. It would also effectively close the border altogether if the average number of migrants encountered by immigration officials exceeded a certain threshold — an average of 5,000 over the course of a week or 8,500 on any given day. The bill also would give the president power to close the border unilaterally if migrant encounters reach an average of 4,000 per day over a week.

A cap on asylum is a violation of international law.