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patrickgillam.bsky.social
I’m not Christian in any conventional sense, but I love this thought in John 9:3: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” A good thought whenever I behold something needing fixing.
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Andrea Pitzer has researched concentration camps. Here she tells the two tools that work when a country faces destabilization.

submitted 3 hours ago • 0 comments

“I was sure that I should never stand alone in this desert world, but that manna would drop from heaven, if I would but rise with every rising sun to gather it.” —Margaret Fuller, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, on her transcendent experience of “no self.”

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Been thinking a lot lately about the new way of living that’s trying to come into being, these fascists be damned. To that topic, this observation by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The new is only the seed of the old.…The new is always making the old superfluous.”

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

The good and bad thing about Our Present Crisis is that it forces us to see The Problem is, as it has been, with us.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

I’m just a guy, but here’s how I think it’ll go down: Republicans will continue to dismantle the federal government. Democrats will do what they can to preserve our world. It won’t be enough. At maximum suffering, the course of action will be evident. It will be the course deemed most radical today.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

We’re not going to rebuild what Republicans are demolishing. Nor are we going to accept their Project 2025 future. Instead, something new is being born. So while I wait to see what it will be, I watch TikToks of grass being cut and rugs being cleaned, and trust some things can be brought back.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Apple Maps has disappointed me.

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Wild to have grown up in the 1960s to enter an adulthood where the political discourse turns on the question, “Are other people real?”

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

“Why aren’t you cheering Trump & DOGE? I thought you wanted spending and deficit cuts!" Here's my long ranty answer posted on the other site...

submitted 18 days ago • 8 comments

All this new coverage of Trump’s Gaza real estate development brain fart strikes me as a big waste of news coverage. As Steve Bannon said, one only need say “Look! Over there!” and the media will chase it, leaving you to do your mischief unsupervised and uncriticized. See Musk, Elon.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

And everyone who said it’s not about race. The fact that the very *first moves* of Trump/Musk were to dismantle racial integration efforts (yes this is what I will call DEI), and destroy USAID, an agency that helped victims of South African apartheid. This is White Supremacy 4.0 in action.

submitted 17 days ago • 31 comments

Here’s thread for the “elections have consequences“ crowd: Dictators who first took office by means of free and fair elections.

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

That's Strict Father Morality as defined by @george-lakoff.com. And it's what unites the GOP fundamentalists with the tech bro authoritarians. www.theframelab.org/understandin...

submitted 18 days ago • 3 comments

“The perception behind ‘Days,’ the nagging regretful sense that the days are gods, each one laden with gifts we are never quite able to take, was expressed scores of times in Emerson’s notes, letters, and journals.” —Richard D. Richardson, “Emerson: The Mind on Fire”

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Pretty wild to have Republicans say government is the enemy for 45 years and only now I’m beginning to believe them.

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

“White fragility” would be better described as “white brittleness.” The concept of whiteness is sturdy enough, which means it’s not fragile. But it’s liable to snap, which means it’s brittle.

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

As I read about Republicans firing people and dismantling government, images like this come to mind. But one difference between World War II and the present is that no one’s going to help us rebuild.

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments