People have wondered why I have spent 3 days mostly pushing back on this idea that "defund the police" is bad marketing.

The reason is, it's an example of this magic trick, the oldest trick in the book.

It's a competition between what I call compass statements. And it matters.

They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened.

This is how abuse works.

3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead.

This is how abuse works.

We have a president who spent 4 yrs lying every time he opened his mouth, obvious lies everyone knew were lies, which his followers believed mostly because the sight of them believing lies caused the rest of us distress, and they loved our distress.

This is how abuse works.

We've endured the sight of police brutalizing our fellow citizens for years, a horror magnified by the knowledge that for Black people this brutality has been a constant way of life, but we're told change must wait, because we aren't asking right.

This is how abuse works.

We have been menaced and lied to and confronted with a daily litany of atrocity that has only made the Republican rank and file happier, and the only message we ever get is that we need to be better at relating to the feelings of people who find comfort in suffering.

It's abuse.

The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.

And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.

We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.

We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.

THREAD: Jonah, Moses, and the Cross.

Jonah is traditionally read on Yom Kippur.

Why?

One reason is no doubt its emphasis on repentance.

Thematic and calendrical issues, however, may also play a part.

Consider the book’s flow of events:

🔹 As the book opens, a threat of judgment looms on the horizon.

🔹 Per the Yom Kippur ritual (on 10th Tishri), lots are cast and Jonah is selected to be sent away.

🔹 And, four days later (14th Tishri), Jonah builds himself a ‘sukkah’ (‘tabernacle’), in which he rejoices (שמח) (cp. 4.6)—a verb specifically connected with the feast of Tabernacles (Lev. 23.40, Deut. 16.15).

Further connections can also be noted.

But, before we dive into their details, we need to take a step back.

(Christians of all people should make they sure don’t get carried away by divers’ lusts: KJV II Tim. 3.6.)

--- A PROPHET ON THE RUN ---

Jonah’s distinctive as a prophet is undoubtedly his decision to run away from his God.

How many other prophetic books open with a description of their author’s disobedience?

1. Yes, @FareedZakaria's new book, Ten lessons From a Post-Pandemic World argues we don't need a big or small gov- we need a GOOD one.

We don't have that now & that is bc for decades now, the GOP has intentionally hallowed it out. Stripping it of funding under the auspice that

2. the only goal should be small. And as it turns out- that was stupid. And now we have a dysfunctional, as @maddow says, "big, bad" gov. Something that has been "wasted, and rotted and ruined." And its been intentional. Its been murdered, with no thought for how people would

3. suffer for it. COVID just put that suffering in a streamlined spotlight. But as @FareedZakaria points out- its the cherry on top of a 40 year plan that Bannon termed the final "deconstruction of the administrative state." As with the decimation of the economic tools that had

4. allowed the world's 1st middle class to emerge & flourish before The Great Lie ushered in the greatest wealth transfer in history. Not only were Americans bamboozled into voting away their wage increases, their pensions, & their health care (at least till 2010)- they were also

5. tricked into pissing away their country's superiority- its claim to fame, its ability to puff its chest out & say "look over here, we have the best _____. " I had no idea when I was a kid that we were not, in fact, the greatest country on Earth- at least not if you care about

As 2020 is coming to an end, you can either read a dozen Quilette articles or letters in The Times - or even throw in a PragerU video for good measure - insisting the British Empire was 'Overwhelmingly a force for good' and that 'wokery' is erasing history...

Or you can avail yourself of the critical and deeply researched work of actual scholars. Here are my recommendations for Christmas gifts this year - for anyone seriously interested in the history of the British Empire and its legacies:

@PriyaSatia 'Time's Monster'

-@profdanhicks 'The Brutish Museum'

-@PriyamvadaGopal 'Insurgent Empire'

-@DalrympleWill 'The Anarchy'

#NowReading #ShoReadingList