People who get a sense of self-esteem from having procreated place a heavy burden on their children. What if the child doesn't live up to their expectations? Creating a new human is not an accomplishment. Treating that new life as a full person starting at birth, and through their whole life, that's an accomplishment. For a man to father a child just means they have a functioning reproductive system. It's not anything to be proud or to expect to be rewarded or respected for.#Heather Cox Richardson: "When President Joe Biden announced just a week ago that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. He passed it to us."#
A note to anyone making a twitter-like system. If you supported outbound RSS, I could use your system as a note-taking tool. I know Bluesky does, and I should use it that way, but these days I'm more drawn to Threads, even though I know it's really Facebook under the covers. #
- Someone in charge at the NYT needs to take a step back and view events, and the NYT role in those events, from the point of view of an ordinary non-NYT-employed citizen, bewildered at the enormous risks journalists are taking with the system of government of the United States. #
- In the context of who we are as a country, and what the Repubs do and say about the country, "weird" is pretty mild. What word would you prefer the Democrats use? Imagine William Safire were here, the great linguist columnist of the NYT, writing that column. (Safire was a Republican btw.)#
- And to the Democrats, no matter what the NYT says, keep using the term. This is where you get to speak out about what they're doing over there, and how it's not journalism. One of the rare things we agree with Trump on. #
- Podcast: 3 minutes.#
- PS: Safire went to Bronx Science! I did not know that. (So did I.) I love the idea of writers who aren't scared of tech stuff. #
- PPS: Even Richard Nixon would think today's so-called Republicans were weird. #