Real progress...
Topic: courage

...is the kind that government could never mandate or block.

Rare protest targets Iranian president

100 Iranian student protest President Ahmadinejad and no police bother them.

That's what real progress looks like.

And it has nothing to do with ideology or power.

It is about courage. And these students have it.

Love,
Ben

Good luck
The Washington Post argues, today, that the next step in Iran, after what, to their credit, they acknowledge is the clear failure of the current strategy for the 3 years it has been tried, is, of course...to do more of the same.

Meanwhile, 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, says the obvious:

"For his part, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has begun arguing that the Security Council should simply concede that its three legally binding, unanimous resolutions ordering an end to Iranian enrichment have been "overtaken by events" and that it should give up the effort to enforce them."

And the post villifies ElBaradei as "an unelected international civil servant whose mission is to implement the decisions of the Security Council -- and who proposes to destroy the council's authority by having it simply drop binding resolutions."

You know, I have to have respect for any public servant who puts independent, empirical analysis above the partisan whims of either the liberal Washington Post, convinced of ElBaradei's suggestion that "any chance to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons through diplomacy would be lost" (apparently oblivious to the fact that their current suggestion means more of the same strategy that has all too clearly failed, for those, like ElBaradei and myself, who are not trying to defend the failure but just face it) or the conservative Bush Administration, who has tried to repeatedly remove ElBaradei from his post when he didn't give them the advice they wanted to hear on Iran, Iraq or wherever in the world they wanted to dominate events.

This is the same public servant who, a year before the International Atomic Energy Agency he represents won the Nobel Peace Prize, was treated thusly by President George Bush:

"The United States helped install ElBaradei in his job eight years ago, but his refusal in 2003 to confirm White House allegations that Iraq had rebuilt its nuclear weapons program lost ElBaradei the American support he had enjoyed.

When he began openly resisting U.S. calls to intensify pressure on Iran, Washington responded by trying to prevent him from taking a third term as agency director. But the effort, led by John R. Bolton, who was in charge of nuclear issues during President Bush's first term, was abandoned in June when no candidate emerged to challenge ElBaradei."

That's my kind of public servant. And was for the world. Except when his honesty challenged any ideology's sacred cows, that is.

This is all I have to say about this, anymore, for the Washington Post, the Bush Administration and every liberal and conservative who is having a hard time facing up to the failure of force to accomplish your ends.

When you're done failing and you want to face the failure more honestly and stop scapegoating Mohamed ElBaradei for the country's failure to face its aggressive, controlling, and otherwise illiberal ways, there are folks like ElBaradei and myself who might have one or two suggestions to get us moving in a better direction.

In the meantime, good luck. You're gonna need it.

Love,
Ben

Pitying the poor

It's starting to occur to me that for me many journalists, activists, political folk, that their concerns around poverty are not really genuine. That for a lot of such folks, it is pity in part based around guilt for how shitty they have treated people in their lives.

As someone who grew up poor and who has experienced serious enough adult poverty, all I can say about that is that no poor person wants anyone's pity. In fact, it is probably the single most important concern that most poor people I know have: not being pitied.

What bothers me about that state of affairs is that what most poor people want more than anything else is to just be treated better, and then to be left alone to make their own choices with their own lives.

But, instead, what they get is pity from more educated advocates on their behalf that they generally haven't asked for and a political period that rationalizes poor treatment of everyone, poor or not.

It is all of our worst impulses treated as if they are more noble than they are. Plenty of good intentions. But not nearly as honest an engagement of whether good intentions result in good consequences.

Most of the poor people I grew up with would want people to put away their pity and focus more on treating people better (though, honestly, many poor people do not treat people very well either; poor people come in all shapes and sizes, too).

How nice it would be for advocacy like this to be genuine; to have people treat other people, poor or not, as individuals and on their merits. And without pity.

If you have never been poor, you may not know the singular indignity that is associated with people pitying you, even when you have much to offer. Poor people generally know that such pity is unworthy of their dignity. And so is all of the bad treatment rationalized as tough love, these days.

Martin Anderson, a 14-year-old boy in Panama City, Florida, died in a state-run boot camp in the name of our rationalizations of "tough love." Love that resulted in his death. I, still, to this day, have not seen anyone take responsibility for his death. All in the name of responsibility. And tough. And love.

We owe it to Martin to face up to this legacy.

But to do so means to face ourselves in a way that I'm not convinced most people have the courage to do. I suppose the irony is that none of us feel love for ourselves or others, enough, to show that kind of courage. But I'm not interested in Martin dying so all of us can pretend that we had nothing to do with his death. Every single person who encouraged the kind and culture of toughness and bullying that resulted in Martin's death are responsible. And I don't really give a shit, anymore, whether people have the courage to take responsibility for that or not.

Kids like Martin don't need pity. Or tough love. Kid like Martin need people around them who genuinely care about them. There's no way that Martin could have died the way he did with people who genuinely cared about him. But we've become convinced in our hubris and our self-righteous clamoring for tough more than love or thoughtfulness or decency or any of our better impulses and higher values that all of our bullying and pressure and force are better or do better than they really do.

Sounds a lot like other regimes I know. Regimes that sacrafice people - their lives, their freedom, their dignity - all in the name of helping them all or making their own kind strong. Regimes that became corrupted by power, and corrupted more absolutely the more power they had.

The greatest tragedy of the early 21st century is that we spent almost a hundred years trying to remove that ugliness from the world. Only to repeat it ourselves.

And Martin Anderson hangs there like a once living testament to our hubris. He waits for us to take responsibility. But, sadly, noone is likely to do so. Because this period isn't about taking responsibility at all. It is about rationalizing our most vengeful, ugly, illiberal impulses all in the name of patting ourselves on the back for our liberal values.

That is the great tragedy of the early 21st century.

If we can't forgive ourselves for this ugliness, I only hope that Martin Anderson can.

Love,
Ben

Sahar al-Haideri (1962 - 2007)
Now Playing: R.E.M. Everybody Hurts
Topic: free speech/thought

Sahar al-Haideri was an Iraqi journalist from her hometown of Mosul who died in the cause of saving her country from sectarian division and civil war.

Requiem for a Brave Woman

As Americans and the world give thought to the question of whether they will stick with the current situation in Iraq, one that Americans, for better and for worse, largely initiated, we should remember Iraqis like Sahar al-Haideri.

al-Haideri undoubtedly knew of the complicated nature and purposes of her country's invasion by American forces to remove a despot who had reigned over the Iraqi nation without democratic or any other recourse for more than two decades. She undoubtedly knew of both the good intentions of the American military and political leaders who had initiated the invasion and the tragic and often counterproductive consequences of that decision.

But Sahar al-Haideri also knew that a stable, democratic government and culture must sprout in its aftermath if there is to be any decent alternative to the sectarian warfare and insurgent attacks on the Iraqi government that currently plague her home country.

As Americans consider what course of action to take next in this terrible and often tragic situation, it is wise and necessary for us to remember the risks and sacrafices of Iraqis like Sahar al-Haideri for her country's democratic future.

Democracy is not just a governing arrangement for any country, including Iraq. For al-Haideri and many journalists, teachers, political representatives, law enforcement, military, businesspeople, non-profit and humanitarian workers, and many, many other Iraqi citizens and those from outside her borders offering help, democracy is a future for Iraq that might transcend the sectarian, theocratic, authoritarian, gender-discriminating, illiberal and other impulses which too often animate the bulk of the political violence and deaths of people like al-Haideri in Iraq today.

Americans and the world should take pause before rushing or abandoning the substantial security work on the ground that is needed to create the political space and sow the political imagination needed for such a future to be realized.

My wishes of peace in the hearts of the family of Ms. al-Haideri and for Sahar, may she rest in peace.

Love,
Ben

A more genuine liberal progress

I've had a lot of time to reflect, this semester, about the kinds of thinking and issues of conscience that I have wrestled with for the last 6 or 7 years, ever since I started doing this theoretical policy work and writing and becoming more genuinely independent of professors and my parents and bosses and of the dominant political culture and so many people in the world.

The more I have watched this sad, sad political period unfold, the more profoundly disappointed I have become with both the period and the people who have promoted it. This obsession with force and power, the attempt to substitute it for a more substantial philosophy of governance and life, the senseless hurt and destructiveness it has sown, the extremes that it moves in because it openly courts such extremes and has only pretense of a more genuine moderation or thoughtful approach to difficult matters of policy and conscience, and the liscence it has given the more brute and thoughtless among us to hold sway out of affiliation with sanctimony and without a sincere concern for policy or people.

The more time I've spent in the "real world," meaning after graduate school and my experience in universities, the more I have become convinced that the most serious shortage in the world outside of universities - and even in universities, often - is a genuine commitment and concern for substantial thought and discussion and debate and engagement more genuinely resolving matters of the heart and mind on their merits, rather than on instinct, or ideology, or sanctimony, or politics in its basest forms, or self-centeredness or just plain pettiness. All of these means of resolving important issues get far too much play in the "real world," especially in the world of politics and especially in power centers like Washington, D.C. Engaged, thoughtful discussions of depth and merit get ignored enough as it is in universities, nevertheless in the places where such discussions and the ideas that animate them have practical consequence. And yet so many, by far most, people fail to take such engaged, deep, thoughtful discussions and bigger ideas nearly seriously enough, largely out of the arrogance that these discussions do not concern them because they already know all they need to know.

That is my assessment of the "real world" and people who do not take such discussions seriously. That they are arrogant far more than they are humble, average joes and janes. They do not engage more serious, thoughtful discussions of important issues because they are convinced, far too often, that they've already got it all figured out. That they already know the right "balance." That they have no need to think more largely because they have no desire to think more and do not like to be bothered with the challenge, but will hide that under the guise and defense of arrogance that all that they need to know is already within their grasp.

It's the single most important quality of universities and the professors and students and people who occupy them that I miss: more genuine intellectual curiosity. It is nice to be among people in a setting where it is less fashionable to pretend that you need not know more than you already do and where it is more sensible to question and consider different ideas, points of view, alternative scenarios and arguments, reasonable disagreement, and more rigorously argued and considered thinking. The absence of that kind of intellectual curiosity and the willingness to think outside of one's own particular box is the single most important quality of most conversations I have, these days, that persistently drives me up a wall.

How in the world anyone could look at a period where the most serious issues are being resolved by force and not by reasonable argument and genuine room for disagreement boggles my mind, largely because I take liberal values more seriously than most folks, I suppose. Democracy, at its highest, is not about bullying your way through difficult issues. It is about engaging the ideas and arguments of those you disagree with as well as those you agree with and those whose ideas are curious and considering important issues from more informed and thoughtful perspectives.

Better thinkers know this. And I have spent an enormous amount of my time post-university with a lot of people who are not such better thinkers. I consider almost everyone a friend. But I've also grown more than impatient and underwhelmed by the bottoming out of standards of intellectual engagement and honesty that have characterized this period. How any liberal could look at this current period and think to themselves, "Now that is what progress looks like," is beyond me. How sad it would be, indeed, if so many enlightened thinkers and scientists and visionaries and even political leaders of the past were to look at the present period and think, "Now that is the fulfillment of everything we worked to create. That is the dawn that rises after the darkness."

How sad, indeed, if that were true.

It very clearly is not. And I am more than eager to reengage the scholarly and university world if only to have a more genuinely reasonable discussion, again, about issues that I care about.

Because this kind of "progress" is no substitute for the more honest liberal values that animate our most sustainable understanding of the world around us and the basis for our liberal democratic culture.

Love,
Ben

A clarifying moment around forgiveness

I'm feeling much better today.

I've been upset with my administration because they've been pushing me too hard. I think they still think they can pressure their way to better results. And I've resented the shit out of it. It's clearly not working and has been seriously counterproductive both in dealing with me, without a doubt, since I just can't be emotionally up to being as productive as long as I am feeling like shit, and I think when dealing with the kids, as well.

A lot of folks who are responsible for others feel like they need to pressure others as long as they are going to be providing for them in some way: paying them a check, providing them an education, raising them to be grown-ups, etc. And especially when people have no alternative, they will often take that. But I'm way past taking it, whether I have an alternative or not. And I'm quite confident that I have other alternatives. I have lots more to learn. But I learn best when I have plenty of room to learn and to make mistakes and make better judgments and I have a much harder time, as do most people, when people are riding me or pressuring me.

And amidst all of this craziness, amidst the general mood for force and against more forgiveness, openess, communication, discussion and debate and space to resolve issues, and as I reflected today with a friend about situations I've had with other friends at different points in my life, something occurred to me.

There is this paradox that we all face that is at the heart of some of the ambivalence we are feeling about a more forgiving and openhearted, openminded spirt, right now.

The paradox goes like this:

We all screw up. Sometimes we screw up big. I've done it. I hope to stop doing it now with some reflection and responsibility on the matter. When we do, we violate peoples' trust. Either in big ways or in small ways. And we are responsible for the screwups. People do not have to forgive us. And, sadly, too often, they do not. But we definitely need to forgive ourselves and take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Many of us do not. Many very powerful and wealthy people do not. It's far too common, really. But it's a sad fact of life. But it's only in the screwup and in the forgiveness that we learn a lot of lessons in life, including this one.

The paradox is that though noone owes us forgiveness and we do not owe others forgiveness, necessarily, we cannot function as individuals, as communities, as societies, and as a species without it. We function terribly without it, actually. All kinds of violence and hatred and oppression and terrorism and genocide and all the worst forms of oppression find their source in our failures to forgive some past wrong or legacy.

We need the forgiveness, big and small, to do the learning, big and small. Without the forgiveness, there is no learning. And without the learning, we are stuck with the same old poorer ways of doing business.

Both facts of this paradox are important truthes about the world.

Noone owes us forgiveness. And we can't function without it.

So something's gotta give.

At the very least, we need to learn to forgive ourselves. And we can always control the fact that we can forgive others, even if those jackasses won't return the favor or do the same for someone else.

But if we're going to function better as friends, family, lovers, and neighbors, we're going to have to learn how to forgive more readily. There is just no way around this one.

We shouldn't go around assuming that people owe us forgiveness as an excuse for taking advantage of their generosity. But we need to give each other that kind of generosity if we are going to be able to do the learning that is the foundation for our forward movement.

So our trust in one another is built on a necessary paradox. We must be able to trust one another to not take advantage of our decency and kindness. But we need that decency and kindness and forgiveness to make our lives bearable, functional, and with any capacity for thriving in this otherwise cold world (although to be fair to the world, it offer plenty of hot spots and mild weather, as well). Without forgiveness, we can't learn from our mistakes. And without that learning, we can't move forward. As individuals and as nations.

And my experience on this one has been that the larger the stakes - meaning both the importance of the screw up and the harsher the consequences we threaten to impose - the harder it is to cough up the apology or to face the shortcoming. And the harsher we treat one another, the worse we make that predicament, no matter how much we may pretend otherwise or sometime get a lucky strike and call it genius for the forces of repression.

Repression drives the shortcoming from our own good sense and judgment, nevertheless from the view of others. It and the threats and harsh treatment that enforce it make it harder for us to acknowledge our follies and serious and not-so-serious errors to ourselves, not just to others. Which makes it all the more difficult for us to take responsibility and to cut the bullshit out.

There has never been a time when our more threatening or mean-spirited efforts have made those same mistakes go away. Ever. We just pretended more, kept things to ourselves more, kept one another in the dark more, and otherwise kept our secrets closer to our chests.

The only way to end that cycle is to do what wise men like Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha and Mohatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu and others have implored and encouraged us to do which is to take forgiveness and letting go of the pain seriously as a personal and societal commitment. As Jesus argued, it is the only way to see better our own faults rather than forever being obsessed with the faults of others. And as Desmond Tutu has argued, it is the only way to work through the most serious sins, like genocide and crimes against humanity, nevertheless the ordinary sins in our ordinary lives.

That part I knew before today. What I wasn't as clear about that I am more clear about today is that it is actually important that people know and be clear about the fact that we are not owed forgiveness. Not because we don't need it, when we've done wrong and when others have wronged us, because we surely do. But that forgiveness is not an entitlement. To be given genuinely, it must be given freely. And to be given freely, it cannot come out of any sort of pressure to be better than we are ready to be when we finally get around to doing the right thing.

A clarifying moment. I'm getting used to them these days. Makes life so much easier to understand and navigate when I can get peek at a little more wisdom than I was planning for.

Love,
Ben

Coming to terms with self-righteous pursuits

As I watch this godforesaken and poorly argued Iraq war debate in Congress, between Congress and the President, in the media, and in international circles, I am coming to terms with the fact that some people will only see the world the way they are already for damned sure that it is.

This post isn't about the substance of that debate. I've written about that ad nauseum. Especially about what should be some humility on this debate, but, inevitably, is overwrought and self-righteous claims of certainty.

I'm even less concerned about the lack of depth in this discussion and the simpler and more polarized divisions that characterize the discussion than I am with the fact that so many people seem so convinced that they are right on every question that's ever occurred to them at this very moment, no matter how much they might have felt differently at another time or might feel differently in the future.

I'm more concerned, right now, with what self-righteous asses we all can be. How certain we are the difficult matters of conscience for so many people most assuredly can be resolved by our superior wisdom. So much so that we would be better to compel their submission to that wisdom than share it, since persuasion is just so fraught with uncertainty and force so guarantess our success.

I think about all of the folks who have taken a series of fairly predictable self-righteous stands during one political period - the 1960's is a popular period for this phenomena for baby boomers - only to be convinced that they were wrong and now are right about another set of fairly predictable self-righteous stands during another period - for those same people, typically today. And it's not just these more obvious folks like David Horowitz or Michael Medved or Christopher Hitchens or David Brock. It's all of us.

"I may have been wrong, at times, in the past," we reason, "But now I've got it figured out. And may God have mercy on the soul that doubts my wisdom or my will."

It's sad. We spend years studying the similar failures of past generations to finally compel righteous behavior from their fellow citizens and all of the tragedy that is wrought from our impositions and self-righteous witch hunts. But we never fail to think that we have somehow all escaped that tendency in the present.

Our forebearers were often fools when it came to regulating the lives of their fellow citizens, we reason. But thank goodness we have learned from their mistakes and finally figured out how to get it right.

Puritan values may have led to scarlet letters and burning of alleged witches, but we've figured out how to protect the moral order today. Alcohol prohibition may have been a miserable failure that led to historical murder records in the U.S. in an underground vice industry that was enforced by a violent underworld, but our current war on drugs is a more noble pursuit that only deals with more serious threats to our civil order. Money and politics may be a marriage that dates back to the invention of government, but we have finally found the rules and finance regulation that will weed out the peddlars of political smut. We may have been more harsh, more brutal, more violent, and more destructive in eras past, but this generation we must get tougher to mirror the strength of our more ruthless legacies.

It's a sad and not terribly well-reasoned spectacle. And it is a perpetual sense of self-doubt in our liberal democratic commitments. We want to be humane, but not too humane. We want to be open and forgiving about our faults, but not too open and forgiving. We want people to be free, but not too free.

And the saddest thing to me is that our self-righteous tendencies never have to face up to themselves. Instead of just acknowledging that we are making uncertain calls in an uncertain world, we constantly argue that we know more than we really do or that are efforts are more successful than they necessarily are. It's a sad, somewhat comic self-fulfilling prophecy. It's Marx and first time tragedy, second time farce without all the revolution. If I never question if I am right, then I am never wrong. And there certainly is no reason for me to take seriously the arguments or concerns of those who disagree with me if I am right all the time.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this uniquely human tendency. No other animal has to justify its actions, because no other animal has the intelligence to think otherwise than what their simple experiences with the world allow them.

Humans, uniquely, have the capacity for intelligent thought. And thus uniquely feel any responsibility to justify their thoughts and judgments to others and have the capacity to make up any justification that suits them, especially when their careers or their reputations or their liberties feel threatened.

How refreshing it would be to have those same discussions with a sense of humility and without feeling threatened and just making our best calls with a sense of openmindedness and openheartedness and no need to justify bad calls just because we made them. How refreshing it would be to acknowledge the much more thorough reality that we tend to make more mistakes than we are want to admit for fear of looking foolish to one another, when the larger foolishness is that we are both so want to admit those mistakes and that it is all the threats that we make against peoples' careers and reputations and families and well-being and lives and freedoms that make us all such cowards and fools. Unless you're Mark McGwire, that is.

To anyone who isn't part of this debate or who aren't making the calls that we are making today, namely our progeny, we have got to seem like a bunch of dimwits and simpletons, heads full of steam and little else. And that goes for almost every political issue that we opine about these days.

We know that's true about our forebearers because we study it for years in schools that we are compelled to attend (and that too many are all to eager to escape as soon as it is possible). And yet, somehow, we all convince ourselves that we have finally escaped that legacy, despite the fact that all of the even most recent history that we have available contradicts that notion.

The way out of that mess is not to make no calls, at all, obviously. But it is to walk more lightly with the calls we make and with the notions we grow attached to. And to presume that perhaps our neighbor may know more than we give him credit for, not necessarily because he actually does, but because perhaps we or anyone know better substantially less than we are more want to acknowledge.

That's the most important lesson that this war has taught me. How little I can trust that most people know for sure anything. Especially the things that matter most. And including the people who know most.

Sadly, the people who are most eager to compel their neighbors are the least likely to bring with them that kind of humility about the matter. And in our own particular brand of democratic irony, we generally call those folks political leaders.

And the sad thing is that so many of those calls really do matter. It just matters more that we have that more humble discussion to get to more right answers than it does to constantly threaten and protect our egos, as we currently tend to do with all of the threats to things we care about, namely our self-images, hanging perpetually over our heads.

Perhaps we are doomed to be self-righteous fools to the ends of our days. But perhaps the hope of liberal democracies is that we might figure this kind of thing out. Because the beauty of that big brain of ours that so many other animals might envy if they had the sense to think about the matter is that we have been given an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on our foolishness and correct our course.

If someone thinks I'm wrong about that observation or that hope, I will, of course, listen. Because it is that capacity to argue and to consider the alternatives that uniquely makes us human. Even when it means that we argue ourselves in circles. And often at our neighbor's expense.

Love,
Ben

The current apex of progressive wisdom

"The Adventures of Thomas Jefferson Bailey"

...or something like that. "Emma Finds Her Way," "It Happened One Christmas"...something...

I just got done myspacing my friend, Leslie. And as I read about her kids I was feeling totally inspired to work on my childrens' book ideas.

I have three ideas for scholarly books that I will try my damndest to combine into one, largely because I know that it's hard enough for most people to read one scholarly book, nevertheless three. So only the most nerdy biographers will read all of my work if I spread it out too much. And I'd like for people to get a lot for their money in that one purchase, if possible.

But I also want a legacy as a humorist and a childrens' book writer, if I could. That will first require that I be funny. Which, like common sense and auto repair, I can do with effort. But I'm willing to be unfunny for awhile until I write something that kids and adults alike don't have to toil so hard to read as a tome on the nature of humanity. Just seems to me that one should be able to gleam that sort of stuff with real people bearing witness to some small bit of wisdom rather than having to listen to some philosopher tell them how the world is as if they really know. And I'm for damned sure that what we need more of in this world is a little humor and little humility about ourselves and how much wisdom we have to offer the rest of the world, because my experience is that the amount of wisdom a person actually has to offer is almost totally inverse to the passion with which he wants to impose it on his neighbor. The less you know, the more you're convinced that noone could manage without your ignorance superimposed on their lives, is my experience. And I've got to have a story or two that can speak that fact of life, I imagine.

And younger people, adolescents, in particular, understand that fact of life better than their elders, in my experience. Although it might do them some good to see clearer why their parents and teachers have so much reason to want to send them to their rooms until they're in their early 20's or so and then send them on their way. Everyone knows it all. And I am the worst of the bunch. So it's appropo, I suppose that I write about the foibles, failures, and shortsightedness of people like me. Who better to tell the story of humanity's blindspots than someone whose got a standing collection.

And it would be fun to write about adventure and romance and imagination and courage with kids being the kind of people that their parents wished they themselves might be.

Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Jim Henson, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, Charles Dickens, John Knowles, Charles Schultz, A.A. Milne, Beattrix Potter, E.L. Konigsburg, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, M.E. Kerr, Barbara Robinson, and especially Mark Twain all wrapped up in one or two or three stories for young people (I figure I've got to fail a couple times before I get something right, and maybe try to get it right again).

I've never been one to necessarily want to write the great American novel. Until I think about all the great stories that made my childhood magical.

Love,
Ben

Creative uses of the term "force"

The more I hear the word "force" used in ways that play so fast and loose with the term to dillute any meaning - "I was forced to think," "You are forced to deal with the reality," or "I'm forced to use bad metaphors" - it becomes clearer and clearer to me just how much people will wallow in their own bullshit before they face up to their big lie.

Here's to a little honesty in the current democratic discussion: when you make no distinction between your idea and its alternatives - in this case, the freedom to choose - it's probably to cover for a bad idea.

Love,
Ben