Kinda feeling like I should've skipped town when I had the chance but instead I chose to build a life here under the assumption that things could be fixed.

The current sticking point with my wife is that it's about getting control of the Supreme Court back, given the assumption that Alito and Thomas will retire/die and (a) the Democrats won't appoint Alito's/Thomas's preferred successors in the name of unity, and (b) the Republicans won't hold open the vacancy to get concessions and/or wait until a Republican president comes into office as they successfully did with Garland. Refusing to budge because of Palestine is "making this about me" and failing to understand that Harris needs the Jewish vote in PA (I pointed out that she also needs the Muslim vote in Michigan, no response).

Nobody else, even fairly close friends, has opined on politics around me and I don't bring it up, so I'm not sure what everyone around me is thinking.

"Are we going to stop and reflect over the rivers of blood spilled just to achieve this one moment of pointless retribution? Oh, looks like we are going to dance in the street, instead. Cool. Love that for us."

Those assumptions being that Atheism is, on it's face, a religion in and of itself. It's belief is in that of non-belief. It has missionaries like most other religious belief systems, seeking to secularize communities and cultures. It believes it is the one true religion and that all other religions are false religions with false gods. It demonizes all other practitioners of these false religions indiscriminately, believing that they are either upholding their wicked systems of oppression, or are directly complicit in them. Countless books have been written about the its theology and the logic of its faith. [and they're universally poorly reasoned sophistry -ed]. It is a fully fledged faith, in that you have to believe in this non-belief, on faith that you will be proven correct when you die.

Bad take imo. Atheism isn't a religion; unbelief is not a belief, and this tired chestnut that "Atheism requires just as much faith as a belief system that posits a supernatural omnipotent creator, physics-defying miracles, and an afterlife for which there is neither plausible physical justification nor any hard evidence" has its source in Christian apologetics.

Atheism does have one element in common with religion, and that is that it is an identity, one that often immediately cuts you off from participation in your local community, which still revolves around the church in a lot of the world. And choosing to take on that identity knowing you might end up a local pariah can be more appealing to the already privileged or the socially incorrigible, among which groups I think we find most of movement atheism's bad actors.

Ideally we live in a world where atheism is unremarkable because it's the default. I used to be a live-and-let-live religious pluralist but I'm now more convinced by Engels' argument that atheism is a precondition to communism because you can't dismantle hierarchies when a bunch of people believe in a unaccountable ruler who only issues judgments after death and whose laws are so up for interpretation people have fought wars over theological disagreements. Yeah, you can be religious and keep it to yourself but it's still a gateway to bad thinking and social factionalism.

"Look at how resource-starved the DPRK is!"

Instant classic.

Glockenspiel, a serious name for a serious instrument.

Apparently Harvard Law.

She's also married to Cass Sunstein, the Nudge guy.

Also, fun Wikipedia quote:

Power's book framed genocide as a problem that the United States was involved in as an onlooker rather than a perpetrator or enabler.

How bad at your job do you have to be to spend a billion dollars running a campaign against Slimer from Ghostbusters only to end up with swing state polling averages like this?

US aid agency is led by Samantha Powers, a scholar of genocide

Soooo... is she over there to offer pointers or what?

The fact that they can keep getting away with the flimsiest of facades and there's a collective societal consensus that we must not call them out on their bullshit has been driving me bonkers this election season.