Quotes

Trump and his followers share a common psychology

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Think about it. The GOP has lost the popular vote in all but one presidential election in the last quarter century. The elders of the party know they have a problem with their overwhelmingly white voter base and its hostility to the emerging demographic changes in the country, and they know the party’s ideology has to be updated to accommodate the modern world. Their laissez-faire economic policies failed and their small-government philosophy is inadequate to greet such global challenges as climate change and mass migration. But their voters don’t want to hear it.

Hullabaloo

Easter 3A

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The idea that Christ brings with him the key to the Old Testament can be found throughout the Gospels, not only in the interpretations Jesus offers but also, significantly, in a number of scenes that occur after the Resurrection and are already (so it seems to me) dominated by the outpouring of truth — in other words, by the power of interpretation that is bestowed on humankind by the Passion of Christ. In the Christian world, it is always a question of re-reading not from the end but from beyond this end; in the light of this beyond, former perspectives are shown to be false. Western culture as a whole, whether Christian or post-Christian, is under the illusion that it is moving further and further away from Christ, like the Emmaus disciples, while it retains a false, sacrificial conception of him. It is struggling to rid itself of Christ for good. But at the very point when it is under the impression of moving in quite a different direction, Christ is to be found beside it, as he has been for a long time, “opening the Scriptures.”

Rene Girard

Is Jesus Gay?

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Was or is Jesus gay in terms of sexual orientation or behavior? I don’t believe so—but it certainly doesn’t matter. For being gay is about so much more than mere sexual orientation or gender identification. It’s about being a beautifully created soul adorned with eternal extravagance imaged in the splendor of the Creator, who no less bears the arduous task of navigating their unique, human experience through the minefields of a brutally inhumane world that would quickly ransack those who break religious molds, clawing to strip them of their divine value, identity, purpose and worth. Beyond the gravity of sexuality and orientation, this is the deeper, ultimate essence of the plight intrinsic to being gay—to be fully human and fully alive while sweating beads of blood in determination to find one’s way and hold onto one’s inherent dignity and God-delighting in a spiritually nefarious, different-condemning, and different-killing world. In this way, Jesus was surely gay.

Chris Kratzer

When the Genius Men of Silicon Valley Suddenly Don’t Seem So Smart

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What possible justification is there, critics are asking, for Y Combinator to retain as a partner a person who not only served as a delegate and Republic National Convention speaker for a presidential candidate associated with white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, and fascism, but who is willing to donate over a million bucks to that candidate at his nadir? What kind of message does that send to, say, the women and racial minorities who are already so often ignored in Silicon Valley? Why not replace Thiel

theintercept.com

Commander In Chief

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I don’t want to elect anyone commander in chief: not the xenophobic misogynist and egomaniac, not the Henry Kissinger acolyte and Libya hawk. The big hole in this democracy is not the candidates; it’s the bedrock, founding belief that the rest of the world is our potential enemy, that war with someone is always inevitable and only a strong military will keep us safe.

The Raven Foundation

The Honesty and Courage of Jill Stein

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On the issue of war and nuclear weapons, it is actually Hillary’s policies which are much scarier than Donald Trump who does not want to go to war with Russia. He wants to seek modes of working together, which is the route that we need to follow not to go into confrontation and nuclear war with Russia.

Jill Stein

Except for all the others

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Email drives me crazy the way it drives everyone else crazy, but I can set aside certain times of the day in which to use it. If I had to have my work interrupted eleven times a day for phone conferences, at someone else’s convenience, or had to have a Slack window open and pinging merrily away all day long, I’d never get anything done. Churchill’s famous comment about democracy — “the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried” — might be adapted here: email is the worst form of business communication, except for all the others that Manjoo recommends.

The New Atlantis

Rick Perlstein on how the Republican Party will recover from Trump.

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But Trump is revealing contradictions in the Republican coalition in a really profound way. The neo-liberalism in the Republican agenda has never been popular. I have polls from 1984 showing people thought that the level of regulation was perfectly fine, they were perfectly happy paying the level of taxes they were paying, all these sorts of things, and yet, Reagan won 49 states. It must have been something else, right? Trump complicates the analysis because he’s shored up his support among the Conservative establishment by outsourcing his tax plan to Stephen Moore and looking more like a traditional conservative, but he certainly doesn’t talk a lot about it on the campaign trail. On the campaign trail, it’s all about the fecklessness of Republican elites who have allowed his voters’ hometowns to turn into ghost towns. How do Republican leaders respond to that?

Rick Perlstein