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hilzoy

@hilzoy.bsky.social

2432 followers 519 following 5320 posts

Ethics R Us. Baltimore. Refugee from Twitter, blogging, and who knows what else.

hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Keeping a little running list of annoyance.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Not words: Abbatoir, Manichean, Tuppence, Fain. Words: Dino, Cuppa.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Mood.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Oh thank God. Besides everything else, Rwanda is (a) a real dictatorship that should not make anyone's list of "safe" countries, and (b) seriously overpopulated.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Oh no; don't worry. Have fun with the kittens!

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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I mean, I don't *feel* freaked out, but I'm not sure I'm the best observer of myself.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Do I count as freaking out?

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Just for the record: I hate everything about this situation, and I have no view about what should happen, not knowing nearly enough of the relevant info. Plus, I'm focused on Trump losing.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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I dunno. Suppose that he is fine for some reasonable number of hours each day (7? 8?), but the rest of the time it varies. He might think: I can do this for the next several months, but I can't do this and campaign, nor can I credibly say that the OK time will not decrease to an untenable level.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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He could say: campaigning for President is like having two jobs, and just being President is already one of the hardest in the world. That's the one I plan to focus on over the next months. Or: I'm fine now, but I can't vouch for the next 4 years. Or a number of other things.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Some things you can make up for. Spend too much money over the holidays; save a bit more thereafter; all good. Some things you can't -- things we did not think were within the realm of possibility UNTIL THEY HAPPENED, and we cannot unsee them. Confusing the two is a serious mistake.

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Soraya Nadia McDonald 's avatar Soraya Nadia McDonald @sorayamcdonald.bsky.social
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This is oddly fascinating in the sense that it doesn't appear that the writer has spent any time with actual artists. He has so little understanding of why or how people make art.

26 replies 12 reposts 102 likes

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Cheryl Rofer's avatar Cheryl Rofer @cherylrofer.bsky.social
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The Dobbs decision, now Project 2025. There's more than enough to beat Trump right there, and his campaign staff knows it.

6 replies 48 reposts 171 likes

hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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(OK, it doesn't rhyme, but surely the name counts for something.)

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Moi? Why would you say that?

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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On the other hand, who would want to be a sociopath with no imagination or empathy? Not me.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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If you assume that nothing bad will ever happen to you, and also that you have no reason to care about those others to whom bad things do happen, you can write as though politics does not matter. You can even write the passage in the screenshot, if you assume you'll never be a dissident or a Uighur.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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He will never lose his job and find himself unable to feed his family. He and that family will never have to live in a car after they've been evicted. His children will never be drafted and sent off to die in a pointless war. He will never be shot by a police officer for looking suspicious.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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He will never be a ten year old forced to give birth, or a woman bleeding out in a hospital parking lot. He will never be a battered woman who cannot get a divorce from a man who she suspects, rightly, will end up killing her.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Also someone who has never been on the wrong side of a social policy. He will, in his imagination, never be enslaved. The family he thinks he will raise in peace (hah) will never be torn apart by his alleged owners. He will never be disabled and put away by his family so no one will know about him.

1 replies 6 reposts 58 likes

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Cheryl Rofer's avatar Cheryl Rofer @cherylrofer.bsky.social
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Let's do this in November in the US! DEMOCRATIC LANDSLIDE!

4 replies 18 reposts 111 likes

Reposted by hilzoy

Gregory Hays's avatar Gregory Hays @aristofontes.bsky.social
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Wow, real banana republic stuff. I'm glad our presidents can launder money and associate criminally without worrying about this kind of thing.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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Thread. It's always true that when you choose Presidents, you're choosing the advisors they will appoint. This is true even if they just turned 35 and run ultramarathons for fun while not winning Nobel Prizes in physics. It's just especially true now.

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Warren Terra's avatar Warren Terra @warrenterra.bsky.social
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My God, have you seen this additional context?

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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"Why bother to rescue that drowning child? The real problem facing me, I mean us, today is an overwhelming sense of ennui and boredom, and no amount of so-called "rescue" and "CPR" and "getting that poor child to dry land" can cure those!"

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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You are unaware that the government can provide public spaces where people can do things other than look at their phones, play video games, and get high? Poor you. But there's no reason to subject the rest of us to your ignorance and lack of imagination, still less for the NYT to give them space.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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... are making this country an uninhabitable wasteland — and neither can any president I expect to see elected in my lifetime." Oh really? Your civics class neglected the existence of environmental and financial regulation, not to mention addiction research and treatment?

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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The closest thing is this: "I cannot change the fact that financialization, environmental spoliation, drug addiction, the hollowing out of the public sector and the subsuming of virtually every aspect of human existence into reality-augmenting digital media ...

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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I don't think that's the only reason.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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That said: this is not my call to make. I will do what *I* need to do, which is work my heart out for whoever is the nominee.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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But this is not the choice I want to be making. (And I did say so back in 2020: that you have to ask not just how you're doing now, but how confident you are that you'll still be doing well in 8 years. My view is: you cannot have that confidence in your late 70s.)

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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If it were the sort of thing that could be outweighed by another really good performance, I don't think we'd be having this discussion. -- For myself, I'd take a diminished Biden plus his staff over a narcissistic psychopath who will take down the Republic any day. No brainer.

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hilzoy's avatar hilzoy @hilzoy.bsky.social
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It was bad. And it wasn't just the optics; I sat there in amazement as opportunities to rebut Trump sailed past, one after another, untaken. (The one that sticks with me is his not saying, when Trump claimed that illegal immigrants would destroy SS/Medicare/Medicaid: But they are not eligible.)

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