Pluralistic: The "religious liberty" angle for overturning the overturning of Dobbs (11 July 2023)


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Pluralistic: In defense of Deliverism (10 July 2023)


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Let the Platforms Burn

The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires.

A forest wildfire. Peeking through the darks in the stark image are hints of the green Matrix 'waterfall' effect.

Cameron Strandberg/CC BY 2.0 (modified)

California needs to burn. For millennia, First Nations people oversaw controlled burns in the forests they lived, played and worked in. These burns cleared out underbrush, saw off sick trees, and created canopy openings that admitted sunlight to help quicken new growth. The importance of fire to healthy renewal is testified to by the regional trees that can only reproduce through fire, including the state’s iconic giant redwood.

Centuries ago, European settlers dispossessed the state’s First Nations of their ancestral lands and banned “cultural burning,” declaring war on both indigenous people and fire. This was the start of a long period of firelessness, during which time ever-more-heroic measures have been deployed to keep fire at bay.

This is a vicious cycle: massive fire suppression efforts creates the illusion that people can safely live at the wildland–urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to this combustible zone. The presence of these people in the danger zone militates for more extreme fire-suppression, which makes the illusion all the more tempting. Yielding to temptation, more people move to the fire zone.

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Designated Survivors

The gerontocratic elephant in the graveyard.

An overgrown graveyard. One of the tombstones is actually the US Capitol. The shadow of a scythe looms over the scene.

I went back to my home town last month and while I was there, I invited a large group of old friends, many of whom I’d known since childhood, for an evening on the patio of a pub.

It was so good to see them all again and to relive our old days, and catch up on all the things that had happened in the years since we’d last seen one another — a decade or more, in some cases.

Then, as is inevitable for a group of old friends in their fifties and sixties, we started talking about who was dead.

We’ve got a lot of dead, which is only to be expected. Barring war or plague or violent natural disaster, the presence of death in a life follows a predictable procession. I lost a great-grandmother at four. A playmate was struck by a car and killed when I was six. A friend committed suicide when I was fifteen. Another when I was sixteen. At eighteen, I lost an aunt to cancer. At twenty, a grandfather died of a heart attack, and then a cousin was killed by a car.

After twenty, things picked up a little. An overdose. Another. Cancer took a grandparent, dementia took another. My mentors — the ones old enough to be my parents or grandparents — died from “natural causes.” A few more contemporaries lost to cancer. A few more to suicide.

By my thirties, all of the mentors old enough to be my grandparents were dead. Many of the ones old enough to be my parents were dead, too. A few of the ones old enough to be an older sibling died, too. One of my dearest friends lay down to sleep and never awoke, felled by a freak brain-bleed.

In my forties, I lost all my grandparents, most of the great uncles and aunts, several cousins, more friends. Some of my friends lost their kids, too: cancer, OD, suicide. Cars, of course.

Now, in my fifties, my friends and I count our dead, name them, mourn them, remember them.

Last month, as we named our dead, a dear old pal said, “It used to be that when I heard about a friend dying, I thought, ‘I wish he’d asked for help,’ or ‘What a freak accident.’ Now I just think, ‘at least it was quick.’” Because they used to die by suicide or misadventure.

Now, they just die.


This week, the GOP supermajority on the Supreme Court made a series of increasingly bizarre and unhinged rulings, including a ruling on a wholly imaginary situation (the ruling’s consequences will not be imaginary).

The outcomes of these elections are incredibly consequential. Many races are determined by the thinnest of margins, and both chambers of Congress sit on razor-thin margins. A single lawmaker’s absence can derail whole swathes of policymaking. A single intransigent lawmaker can plunge millions into poverty, or hold the majority hostage.

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Pizzaburgers

“Everybody hates this idea, so it must be great.”

A pizzaburger: a fat, juicy beef patty with lettuce, onion and tomatoes, sandwiched between two crudely photoshopped pizzas.

I encountered the work of political communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio through The Persuaders, an important book about how people change one another’s minds that Anand Giridharadas published in 2022.

Shenker-Osorio helps politicians and movements develop “messages,” but unlike the tradition concept of messaging as a way of bypassing the audience’s critical faculties, Shenker-Osorio wants to engage them.

That is, rather than tricking you into supporting an issue by, say, linking it with motherhood and apple pie, Shenker-Osorio wants to actually convince you that a given issue deserves your support.

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Pluralistic: Conservatives are fringe outliers – and leftists could learn from them (16 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Google makes millions on paid abortion disinformation (15 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: How Amazon transformed the EU into a planned economy (14 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Saving the news from Big Tech with end-to-end social media (13 June 2023)


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Pluralistic: Podcasting "Ideas Lying Around" (12 June 2023)


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